A quick and dirty guide to being a good language teacher
Hello everyone, and welcome to Project Polyglot!
Today we’re covering an important topic, which is how to be a good language teacher rather than learner. Project Polyglot is about reaching out to all language aficionados, and that doesn’t just include students.
This article is particularly meant for people who, like me, got their start at teaching English through a grant program overseas that required them to jump right in with little or no prior teaching knowledge. Here I’ll be giving you a real primer on how to design lessons and teach effectively — a skill you’ll develop all throughout your time teaching, just as speaking a new language is a constantly growing skill.
I’m drawing from my experience working for two years in American bilingual grade schools, three years working in Spanish multilingual schools of all grade levels, countless hours of private tutoring and, finally, the Cambridge CELTA program that is the international standard for English teacher training.
A Word On Causing Learning
The most important point to make right from the start is that your students are going to benefit most from immersion. Besides the evidence suggesting that immersion is a very effective language-learning tool, think about how you first learned to speak. You didn’t go to classes — instead, you absorbed the language from constant, real-world exposure to it. That’s kind of obvious. It’s a very natural way to learn.
I’ve definitely learned the majority of what I know about languages through immersion. I studied Spanish academically from grade school all the way through a Spanish minor in college, but I didn’t actually begin to speak it fluently until I had lived in Spain for about six months. And I have never undertaken any classroom studies of my second foreign language, Catalan, and I can converse, read and write in it (getting better every day!).
Yes, teaching using immersion is harder. It requires the teacher to get creative, to sometimes struggle to explain something without giving in and breaking into the students’ native language. But consider this: Teaching does not always lead to learning, to paraphrase English language teacher extraordinaire Jim Scrivener. There are effective ways to encourage learning through your efforts as a teacher, and there are ways to downright prevent it.
Think about it — have you ever sat through a dull lecture only to come out of it realizing you haven’t picked up a single useful thing? We’ve all been there at one time or another. That’s usually due to a teacher arrogantly thinking his un-interactive drone of information counts as acceptable teaching, when really it’s obvious that he’s more concerned with pontificating than helping you learn.
Similarly, refusing to make an effort to teach English class only in English is at best arrogance and at worst lazy. So don’t be that teacher who doesn’t strive on behalf of the students, no matter what other (less motivated) teachers sigh and tell you is acceptable; hold yourself to a higher standard. A teacher’s goal is to use the best methods to cause learning (an insight again attributed to Scrivener).
If you want to have a good shot at that, continue on for some simple and practical steps for lesson design and delivery.
Have a Goal
The first part of creating an effective English lesson is to have a goal about what you want your students to achieve during the class. This should be geared toward practice. For example, today’s lesson goal is to be exposed to new vocabulary about animals and to practice using it. Or, today’s goal is to practice talking about the students’ favorite foods. Or to practice reading a newspaper article for details.
Don’t be too broad, and don’t assume that learning will take place. An overly broad goal would be “to practice reading books,” and a presumptuous goal would be “to learn all the names of the letters of the alphabet” (remember, we’re aiming for practice). You can’t actually assure that your students have learned something, so that is not a practical goal. However, you can assure that they get some practice in with the target language for the day.
Of course, you need some study material in order to have goals. The material itself can be drawn from many sources. Are you using a textbook? Most English textbooks worth their salt have a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the grammar, vocabulary and other items covered. Make sure to look at the lessons themselves to get a feel for how much information is presented in each class. Often, there will be a batch of vocabulary plus a certain element of grammar being explicitly or, as is often the case in children’s course books, implicitly presented in the activities. Scoping out a few lessons will give you ideas for what goals can be based off that material.
There are four general language-learning skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening. Speaking and writing are “productive,” which require students to create things from their own knowledge pool, while listening and reading are “receptive,” which means that students are asked to interpret information they receive. A standard lesson will give most weight to two of these skills at a time — working in great depth on all of them would be hard to cover in just one class, but only emphasizing one would be a bit limiting. This is only a loose rule, of course, and can be changed as you have new ideas and are more comfortable creating lessons. Over time, the lessons will hopefully give a fairly even spread to all the four standard skills.
Make sure that the goal has a couple skills in mind, as well as an aim toward practicing the material you’re presenting, and you’ll be on the right track.
Lesson Design
The general course of an ideal lesson will go like this: Present information (20% of class) and practice information (80% of class).
Present information: This could be new vocabulary, a story, a song, a series of phrases, really anything that is going to contain the target language of your lesson goal modified by what skill you want to work on. You will want to present the relevant information before doing activities so students have something to practice. Keep your presentation short, sweet and clear. Something fun and memorable will have a big impact! Do as best as you can to show and model what language you want to practice, not merely explain it. Also, remember that people often store similar groups of words together and that by asking them to look at something you are presenting and make predictions about what it is, you are helping them access those recesses in their brains. Prediction is a great opener when presenting a new photo, story, song title. Ask, “what is this about?” and get them guessing!
Practice information: The majority of the class should be spent having students practice and/or produce (are you working on any productive skills for this class?) the new language. They’re here to learn English, not just observe it from afar! So focus the bulk of your lessons on doing a variety of activities. Below I’ll discuss how you can go about designing good activities!
Activity Design
Once you have a goal and a fair idea of what you want to accomplish, you’ll want to put a bit of thought into the details of how you’re going to go about that. Lessons should be centered around a series of activities, which are able to be designed and presented as tiny little hamburgers. Burgers have a core number of important elements or they aren’t burgers at all — so it goes with designing activities. View a lesson as a series of about three to five mini-burgers as follows (the fastest way for me to get this online was to put the picture on Twitter):
The Lesson Burger
So, you can see that each activity has five discrete stages.
1. Instructions: Here, you will explain or demonstrate what the activity will be. Think about how to keep these instructions short, clear and in English. You’ll want to plan a bit ahead of time. If it’s a worksheet, hold it up in front of you and point to the different parts as you explain. Do this before you pass it out or the students won’t pay attention to you.
One word of advice: never have a student read directions out loud to the class. In fact, never have a student read anything out loud that you actually want him/her to understand, because the productive skill of speaking (and everything that comes with it — pronunciation, rhythm, tone) is different from the receptive skill of reading, and the students will typically find it hard to understand something they are producing out loud for the first time. Has it ever happened to you as a student that you read something in front of the class, only to realize you had no idea what you just said? Chances are you had to silently re-scan the text in order to catch up.
2. Instruction check/demo: I am going to tell you something very, very important. Asking the students “do you understand?” will be met with vague nods, a mixed response or often no response at all. If a student really has not understood some part of your instructions, you can be sure that he will neither want nor be able to formulate a way to ask for clarification in response to this question. Instead, ask a specific and simple question that will determine if the students have truly understood you. For example, if the activity is to fill in a crossword, ask the students “what do we do here?” and point to the boxes. You may not get a super coherent or perfectly phrased response, but students may mime writing in the air, say “write” or indicate in some concrete way that they have understood these specific directions.
Ask one or two simple questions and no more — questions that provoke a yes/no responses are great and even preferred. For example, “do we write in these boxes?” Also, you can and should demo one of the questions or part of the activity for added clarity.
3. Task: The meat of the burger and what should be given the most time. Students learn not through listening to you pontificate, but by practicing for themselves. Before students actually begin the task, make sure you announce that there is a specific amount of time they will have to finish it — usually between five and ten minutes (say a concrete number, even if you intend to fudge that amount a bit). That lets students know that they need to focus, work and that the class will be moving onto other things in a short while.
Then, let the students work on what they’ve been given. Your job now is to circulate non-threateningly (read: don’t hover over students and stare at what they’re doing or they’ll get uncomfortable) and to answer any questions that come up.
4. Pair check: After time has been called, pair the students up and instruct them to compare answers. This has several benefits. First, they will be able to self-correct a bit before presenting their answers to the class. Second, they will be held accountable for actually doing good work! Usually, students aren’t accustomed to the idea of pair checking, so at first it might take a bit of effort to get them into the routine. However, it is as important to the activity as ketchup is to a burger.
5. Whole class feedback: This is the moment that the students present what they know. You can have them come write answers on the board, or say them (but avoid reading of long sentences), or volunteer them (don’t always let the same person volunteer — you’re teaching a group, not just one person). Kindly but unfailingly correct mistakes right away, because this is the last chance to get it right.
So, here is an example task based off the burger for a word matching exercise:
1. Instructions: “Match these words [point to words] with these blanks [point to blanks]. You have five minutes to finish.”
2. Instructions check/demo: “For example, ‘green’ goes with ‘grass’ [demonstrate as you write].” “Ok, are we going to write? (yes)” “Where do we write the words? (in the blanks, down there, there…).”
3. Task: Hand out exercise. Circulate and help people who are stuck. Don’t spend too much time in any one place.
4. Pair check: “Time is up! Now, pair check with the person next to you.” (it helps to indicate who is working with whom). During pair check, you write numbers 1-10 on the board.
5.Whole class feedback: Have each pair of students come up and write one answer on the board. Make corrections as they do this so that mistakes don’t get modeled. Give each person a moment to write corrections on their papers. Then move into the next activity.
Some Further Tips
On vocabulary: Make sure you present the lesson’s important vocabulary to the students before they undertake an activity that uses it. This includes looking at the activity and finding key words that the students will need to know.
When you’re presenting new vocabulary that’s part of the lesson goal, pictures or real-world examples are great. Aim for visual, tactile, and anything beyond just a new word written on the board. You don’t have to get crazy with all new vocabulary you present, but the key vocabulary for the lesson should be given some special treatment.
When you present a new word, do so in this order: Meaning, Form (how it’s written) and Pronunciation. Model the pronunciation and then choose a couple people to say the word for you so you can get a feel for if they’re getting it.
On teaching kids: Kids have a shorter attention span. They like to play more. And that’s great! Use stories, visuals, songs, videos, games. Keep in mind that you may have to have a few backup activities in the event that the class needs a rhythm change. Incorporate as much physical movement as you can, whether it’s lining up by age against the wall or mimicking the actions of new vocabulary. Keep things light but language-focused. If you’re not having fun, the kids are surely not having fun. Do activities that you would have found entertaining in grade school! When you read to them, read enthusiastically. When you sing, don’t be afraid of looking a bit like a goof.
Keep in mind that activities may be a bit looser in structure than the lesson burger suggests — depending on age and time, things like pair checking and whole class feedback may need to be kept simple, fast and light. Pair checking in some cases is not very practical (especially with very little kids), but really consider if it may be possible on some level before you outright skip it. Can the kids at least show each other their handiwork before you collect them all together and provide some form of feedback?
Also, from day one you need to be authoritative but not mean — there’s a big difference! Kids will respect you if you follow through with what you say you will do and if you don’t ask but tell them what you expect them to do. When you’re teaching, draw the distinction between being their friend (uneven discipline, not demanding good behavior, allowing the students to direct what is happening, asking students to do something instead of directing them to do something) and a kind but firm authority figure (directing the class with active requests, frequently reclaiming order, not allowing things to drag on, having even and fair discipline). It’s still okay to smile, eh?
Talking too much: This is a common mistake. Try to keep your talking amounts down — the students are here to practice English, not you. Be efficient in your directions, and focus your talking time on correctly modeling the target language. Don’t feel the need to fill every silence with talking — sometimes students need a second to think, or there are natural pauses in directions, conversations and answers. Even if you don’t think you’re talking too much, you are. Really. All English teachers constantly combat this tendency.
This also means not repeating every answer the students give you. You’d be amazed at how common this is. What it does is fill the air with your chatter and subtly let the students know that they don’t have to say the target language right because you will for them. Instead, confirm correct answers with “good,” “okay,” “yes,” or else offer a succinct correction.
Planning too much: Plan so that you can visualize how things will go and have a batch of good activities that you have considered. Don’t write yourself a thesis every time you’re going to give a lesson or you’ll go crazy. Remember: draw from the material to create a lesson goal, use the lesson burger to design three to five activities that will take about 10-15 minutes each, and get the students to practice. That’s it!
A Sample Lesson Plan
Here I’ll present a rough outline for a simple lesson plan that draws from the above ideas. A lot of this can be swapped out for other vocabulary sets and songs. Hopefully this can jump start you in your first days teaching!
Students: Second grade class, class time of one hour Material: Body part vocabulary from a textbook Lesson goal: Students are exposed to and practice saying and writing body part vocab.
5 minutes: Introduction. Tell students your name, ask theirs. Sing the Hello Song.
10 minutes: Lead into new vocab by pointing to body parts and asking “what’s this?” Task: Students respond to the word you shout out by raising or pointing to the correct body part. Then they play in pairs, taking turns leading. Feedback: Pairs take turns trying to say the body part you indicate.
15 minutes: Elicit names of body parts again from random students and write them on the board, making sure to cover Meaning, Form and Pronunciation. Task: Students fill out a body chart with the right words. Then, pair check. Feedback: Students take turns coming up to the board and filling in the right answer on a blown up chart.
10 minutes: Model the song “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.” Task: Lead the students in singing the song together fast and slow (this can get crazy and hilarious), and then they sing it in small groups. Feedback: Student groups take turns leading the class in the song.
10 minutes: Task: Students must line up along the wall in order based on physical attributes, like biggest feet, longest fingers, shortest hair. Feedback: Ask students to remember who had the biggest feet, the smallest feet, the longest hair, etc.
5-10 minutes: Clean up the class, sing the Goodbye Song and dismiss students one by one to go join the line at the door. Make sure they say goodbye!
Remember, this is a quick and dirty guide, but a sturdy set of ideas nonetheless. You’ll soon learn a lot and have your own big ideas that may at times go counter to what is presented here — that’s okay, as long as you are using the best methods you can come up with to cause learning.
Future articles will return to this article. Until then, I welcome your feedback and experiences! Good luck, do good work and cause some learning.
-Kelsey
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