The ESA Methodology of Teaching - The Study Phase
This video is part of our ESA Methodology series. The ESA methodology consists of three stages. In this series, we look at the individual purposes of each stage and typical activities for each stage. This second video introduces the study phase of ESA. The purpose of this phase is to cover the actual teaching of the lesson and to check the understanding of that material.The second stage or phase of the lesson is known as the study phase and really the purpose of this phase is to cover the actual teaching of the lesson and to check understanding of that material. Typically in an ESA lesson, the study phase will have two parts. The first phase of the study is to cover the actual teaching component in what's known as the board work and what we try to do in the board work phase is to elicit, to gain information, from the students about the teaching point. So this is very different to the normal didactic way of teaching, where someone stands at the front and explains the information. In the ESA methodology, wherever possible, you are trying to draw the information out from the students. In this process, known as elicitation, once that information has been generated on the board, what the teacher can then do, is cover any gaps in knowledge that they're unable to elicit from the students. The teaching point then being complete, we can then move over into the second part of the study phase, which is to check the students" understanding of this information. The second part of the study phase, once we've elicited this teaching point from the students, is to then check their understanding. Now, one question that's often used in classrooms to check understanding is "Do you understand?" Really this is a waste of time because the students will quite often say "yes" whether or not they do and so in order to check understanding, what we have to do is to ask targeted specific questions about the teaching point. So, what these questions have to tell us is, by answering them, the students have an understanding of the material that we've covered in the teaching point. The types of questions that we ask could be for example what are known as gap fill activities. So quite often, they have a sentence where there is a gap and they have to choose, typically a vocabulary word, in order to complete that sentence and make it make sense. Another example of an activity might be something like a matching exercise and there are all sorts of things that they could match, for example they might match a word to a picture or they might match a picture to a description or they could match a word to a description itself. So, again, both of these activities are very targeted in that the students have to be able to understand the material in order to get the answer correct. Another type of activity that can be used here, we could describe as word order and typically you will take a sentence and scramble it up and the students then have to recreate that sentence in the correct order to make it sensible again. This will show understanding of the particular vocabulary or grammar point.
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