Remember the rule of 25% TTT and 75% STT?
In case you dont know what Im talking about, it means that a teacher should talk only 25% of the time during a good ESL lesson. TTT = Teacher Talk Time, and STT = Student Talk Time. In the early days of my ESL teaching career, I found this impossible to achieve, in fact I found it really difficult to get students to speak for 25% of the time! Have you found the same problem? Do you have a solution? Maybe this is one that will work for you.
The methods employed by teachers in the modern second language (L2) classrooms are based on the various beliefs that an individual teacher has about language, language learning and language teaching. These beliefs are reflections of L2 theories about language acquisition and learning that, like the methods employed, have changed considerably over recent years. There has been a drift away from a teacher centered style of pedagogy towards a communicative approach to language learning. This is in order to prepare students for effective real word communication in the TL. To bridge the gap and examine the relationship between theoretical approaches and practical applications of modern L2 teaching methodology, some kind of framework is necessary.
What is the relationship between Memory and Attention in the classroom? As a teacher, it is important to maintain the child's attention, but does memory have a co-existence in this field? Attention is seen as being important because, "we do not pay close attention to much of the information to which we are exposed, typically only scant mental processing takes place, and we forget new material almost immediately".
Ever wonder why kids hang on to their teddy bears, binkies, blankies, etc. for so long? Have you ever wondered why they don't understand a story you've told them? Because kids are touchy-feely! Children do not actually understand abstract ideas until around age 8. They will be able to pay lip service to something abstract earlier, but most don't actually understand the concept until around age 8.
Teaching is always a dynamic activity. It unfolds a world of knowledge and information, experience and erudition (Chakrabarti, 1998). Effective teaching requires more than straightforward teaching methods. Teachers need to know their students well and be able to adapt their teaching styles to a particular classroom and to individual students. (Elliott et al, 2000).
If you are a teacher who finds that "nothing works" to manage some students, this article may help. It's way past time for you to learn about ODD, Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
Academic dishonesty includes cheating and plagiarism, the theft of ideas and other forms of intellectual property that occur within an educational setting. In high school, a standard penalty for academic dishonesty is a failing grade, while in college it can result in expulsion. The most widely spread forms of academic dishonesty are cheating and plagiarism.
Much has been said and written lately about providing students with choices. I'm all about any methods which will improve student involvement in class, giving them ownership in their learning. There are many ways to give students choices, options, or just to provide random results and change up the monotony.
At times, teachers may feel inundated with theories, methodologies, teaching strategies, etc. Please keep in mind that this is your class, your students and only YOU know your own limits. As I have told my student teachers, and new or inexperienced teachers that I have mentored...
The newest is always the best or so many people believe but what if we took the best of the old and combined it with new technology to deliver it? For literally thousands of years there were only a few teaching methodologies for foreign language education. Then with the advent of world war two there was suddenly a need to teach foreign languages to large numbers of people in a very short period of time.
In recent years, language teaching has focused on the learning process rather than the teaching of the language. The emphasis is not only on linguistic competence of the language learners but also on the development of their communicative ability. In order to develop the learners' communicative ability, the teacher needs to create a scenario to teach the target language in a vibrant, active and interesting manner.
The children you teach are already learning, but would you like to help them even more, especially those who seem to be struggling? It's no secret that some children learn much faster than others and that this soon leads to imbalanced levels among classmates.
A short article on how to go about preparing instructional programs utilizing the Jay McTighe's and Grant Wiggins Understanding By Design. Understanding by Design is a new approach to the teaching/learning process by utilizing an entirely new, but very effective model - Backward Design.
This is a short follow-up to a previous article on the viability of virtual worlds as language learning/teaching platforms, in specific Second Life. Focus here is the use of SL (Second Life) as a component of blended learning.
http://eslarticle.com/pub/articles/english-as-a-second-language-esl/virtual-world-scepticism-792.htm
Your students are deathly afraid of making mistakes and looking stupid in front of their peers. Failure hurts...especially at school...especially in front of their friends. Were you ever humiliated in front of your classmates? I was. It still hurts!
Anchor activities are student centered activities that are designed to extend and review already learned skills. These activities are ongoing assignments that are self-directed. In other words, the students work on these activities independently throughout a given unit.
In order to make a language class successful one has to try to match its content with various methods aiming to make studying exciting and engaging. The usage of modern technological equipment ought to be taken in consideration when preparing teaching materials for a language course.
I am always amazed at the range of ability levels of my students within any given class. Within one 8th grade class I may have students who struggle to read and write while at the same time have students (within the same class) who are reading and writing on an upper high school level.
Anyone who has ever taught using the technique of presenting the language, practising it in a controlled way and then giving students the chance to use it in a free communication production activity will know that it is far from a perfect method, and some of the legitimate attacks on its theory and practice are...
Accepting responsibility for their own learning can be a significant challenge to students. This is especially a problem if they have grown up in a school system that had an emphasis on objective testing against nation-wide standards.
American higher education is shifting from a focus on what teachers teach to what learners learn. The role of teachers is shifting from one of disseminator of knowledge to facilitator of learning. One of the ways that we can encourage the shift to occur is in the construction of learning centered syllabi.
The focus in schools today is to raise achievement among our students. While that is an admirable goal, I suggest that schools evaluate what they are already doing well. Then, get rid of those less important strategies and focus on those that are really working.
What's this -- classroom assistants must learn to do nothing? Is this crazy talk or what? No, not crazy -- totally serious. It's is often extremely beneficial when managing children's behaviour to stand back and do nothing.
Overall, the main way in which Montessori children differ from traditional students is that Montessori children love to learn. They do not memorize facts and figures for the purposes of passing a test or pleasing adults. It is that passionate love for learning which separates Montessori students from traditional students.
The reason I like the end of the year so much is because it is such a clean break. At no point during the regular school year do I feel anything but an impending sense of doom every day when I get home from work. I am always behind and playing a game of catch-up.
You already know your subject better than anyone else, and you are ready to share your knowledge. Have your knowledge respected, and your instruction remembered.
Thanks to a lot of research, it has been found that creative thinking can be taught and learned. So as teachers, we should be encouraging and developing creativity, but this is often not the case.
An important responsibility of an ESL teacher is to create an effective learning environment for learning to take place. This involves both actions and the decisions of the teacher. The actions are those things that are done in the classroom, such as rearranging the chairs and desks. The decisions relate to how and when these actions are implemented.
In recent years a debate has developed over which approaches to structuring, planning and implementing lessons are more effective. Theorists and practitioners are constantly arguing about how language acquisition takes place and how best to facilitate this. Many approaches and methods have been developed which have had a substantial impact on language teaching.
Excellent instructors know the power of metaphor, analogy, and story. They engage in elegant leverage by using something their students know well in order to introduce, explain, and anchor that which is being taught and learned. Additionally, systems thinking is rife with metaphor, analogy, and story. The simple diagrams of systems thinking serve to sketch reality, using circles and arrows and graphs we know and understand to create images that represent abstract ideas and complex relationships.
Curriculum and instruction go hand in hand when it comes to meeting standards. Without a strong curriculum, instruction becomes lost and weak. Curriculum guides instruction and without curriculum there is no instruction. My theory is based on research and classroom experience as a teacher.
Some American public schools are rendered inefficient because they adopt flawed methods. Be careful what fads you bring into your own schools. Some of the worst are described here:
It's amusing now to think back to the 1960s and early 1970s when there was so much talk about replacing teachers with televised learning, computers and programmed learning systems. I remember reading articles titled, "Will teachers become obsolete?" Times have changed!
To be told or to be encouraged - the educator's conundrum. Research carried out by Elizabeth Bonawitz and Patrick Shafio published in "Cognition" recently addresses the question as to whether teachers should 'tell pupils' the way things are or encourage them to 'explore' and 'play' Remember in the review of the National Curriculum in which Michale Gove (Education Secretary) was reported as saying "lessons should emphasise the learning of facts and equip children with essential knowledge" and "every child must be given a "profound level" of mathematic and scientific knowledge" (The Guardian 20th Jan 2o11) Remember the collective sigh of educators who saw this as yet another call for a return to 'traditional' approaches that 'served us well in the past'.
At the height of the Communicative Approach, Task-Based Learning and approaches whose emphasis was not on grammar, to reject or even suppress explicit formal instruction became fashionable. Some (Krashen, 1982; Prabhu, 1987) even went as far as claiming that it was at best ineffectual and at worst an obstacle to L2 learning. However, there have been controversial arguments against this assumption.
In the 80s, as a music teacher for kids with labels and diagnoses, it was my joy to have had the forethought to have school systems buy mixing equipment and teach students how to use it. Was this outside-the-box education, or did I view the current trend and make it part of the classroom experience?
We live in an age of increasing competition for just about everything. There are those who firmly believe people everywhere love to compete. Then there are those who claim competition benefits only the winners, leaving behind a group of demoralized losers drowning in the wake of the successful.
As a principal, school administrator, or department head, your number one priority (after safely getting the kids out of the hallways and into a classroom) is to ensure that learning actually takes place in between the ringing bookends of your bell schedule.
Teaching English as a second or foreign language entails the use of both traditional teaching methods as well as instructional techniques that are unique to the study and learning of language. Based on the teaching experiences of educators around the world, different techniques should be deployed depending on the instructional purpose, the subject matter, and the students' level of competency, cognitive ability and enthusiasm.
