BE A ‘MISTAKE MANAGER’, Alias Ways of ‘Error Correction’

/ New to ELT, Teachers

Just one word before we start When I was a teacher trainee, I was trained among others in ‘error correction’. Recently, I came across a synonym, which I personally find a bit sophisticated: ‘mistake management’. Things might be reinvented and renamed, we are still speaking about our good old ‘error correction’. It is, however, important to distinguish between mistake and error.

Improve Your Pronunciation & Listen To English Varieties

/ Lesson tips, Listening training, New to ELT, Teachers

Students often struggle with listening because of their pronunciation. Since they mispronounce words, they expect a different pronunciation and cannot recognize words because they are pronounced differently. It is not unusual that they don’t recognize words because the speaker’s pronunciation is different from the one they are used to (usually the teacher’s pronunciation). Students very often prefer one variety of the English language, e.g. British, only because they have had British teachers in English. However, English has many varieties.So, it’s essential that you approach pronunciation and varieties from the first lesson at A1 level.

ESL LESSON TIPS – WHAT TO DO IF…

/ Lesson tips, New to ELT, Teachers

ESL teachers are always supposed to write a lesson plan, to know what they are going to do in their lesson. However, the biggest part of the job is ‘on the stage’. Your authentic interest in your students, your skill to improvise, your sense of humor, your problem-solving skills will weigh more in your evaluation than the perfection of your lesson plan. However, to be good at problem-solving and improvisation, you need to prepare mentally (anticipating problems). Here are some ‘What to do…’ questions for you:

NOT A BIG DEAL: IT’S ONLY A CONVERSATION CLASS

/ New to ELT, Teachers

WHY TO STATE THE OBVIOUS? In 2006, I decided to go to a language school and study Italian. I had already had a good intermediate level in Italian at that time, but I understood that I needed some guidance. While I could read, watch TV (ergo listen), study grammar or vocabulary at home, I still needed somebody to do conversation with. So I started to explore what language schools had to offer. In Florence, it was no problem to find Italian courses for foreigners. However, this experience turned out to be shocking.

BTW, LESSON PLANNING

/ New to ELT, Teachers

INTRODUCTION One question on my job interviewer list is whether the candidate can handle more levels/age groups and different types of courses in one day. Most candidates answer automatically yes. However, a normal teaching day in our part of the world looks like this: pre-scheduled courses start at 3pm, 4.30pm, 6pm and 7.30pm (e.g. two YL, a one-to-one and finally an adult class) and you might be even lucky to get an individual lesson before that (let’s say 1.30 to 3pm). It can easily get overwhelming to sit down and write four-five lesson plans in a row for the coming day. You may not know

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TEACHING OBSERVATION NOTES OF A D.O.S.

/ New to ELT, Teachers

ALIAS DON’T TAKE ANYTHING FOR GRANTED After years of daily classroom routine, teachers tend to do things automatically, without even noticing that they do these things that way. These can be even bad habits (talking to students while continuously wandering about the classroom, using monotonous tone when giving feedback or just repeating ‘good job’ even after a mistake, etc.) and a supervisor after a classroom observation can (and should) help notice and correct them. However, there is a long list of good habits we usually do without thinking about them. When in 2011 I was asked to coordinate 12 teachers

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WHAT MAKES A GOOD TEACHER CANDIDATE?

/ New to ELT, Teachers

What are the qualities of a good teacher? Have you ever asked yourself this question?This post is addressed to teacher colleagues who the first time would like to teach English to non-native speakers. They might even have some qualifications, but without job search and classroom experience they might end up disappointed after a job interview. So let me give you some food for thought about why being a good English speaker is not enough to be a good teacher candidate?

WYSIWYG – From your CV to a Teaching Job Offer

/ New to ELT, Teachers

You might be a new teacher applying for your first teaching job. Or even more, you’ve already gained some experience and a good reference letter and you might only be browsing the net for interesting destinations where to teach. But for some reason, nobody or only a few D.O.S. recognize your potentials, even though you have been sending your CV in group mails to numberless language schools in the last couple of weeks? You even tackled two or three phone interviews. Well, then stop for a second, read what your potential supervisor might think on the other end of the wire and

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10 TIPS HOW TO PAIR UP STUDENTS

/ Lesson tips, New to ELT, Teachers

The dynamic of a lesson depends very much on the variety of used social forms (individual work, pair-work, group-work, whole class discussion, etc.). However, students often get stuck with the same partner. Asking students to work in pairs is good, but without swapping pairs, it is not as efficient as expected. Here are 10 tips on how to pair up students: