Teaching Tips

Here are 2 tips:

Did you know?

Monitoring gives you the opportunity to hear how the students are coping with the activity and to make notes about pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar points that are causing difficulty.

it’s a good idea to indicate that you’re actually listening to the students.

But how can you do it effectively?

While the students are doing an activity you walk slowly round the classroom and listen to their conversations.

You can sit down too, if there are enough chairs, but try to sit in the background a bit or the students will direct their conversation to you.

Look at one pair whilst actually listening to a different pair nearby. Correct the pair nearby just to keep everyone on their toes - they never know when you’re listening to them so they can’t ever switch off or revert to their mother-tongue.

Be ready to massage any flagging conversations back into life, to stop students monopolizing conversations, to stop students falling out with each other and to offer encouragement and praise where appropriate. Listen and supervise.

Take a piece of paper and a pen with you on your travels round the classroom so that you can jot down any howlers.

Have you heard of CCQ’s?

Concept Check Questions, to know if the sts really understand what you want to teach them. But how can you do it?

Ask the students a question closely related to the target concept. For example:

If you are working on a third conditional sentence like this: ‘I would have done my homework if I had had enough time’, your concept checking questions could be these: Did you do your homework? Did you have enough time? If you’re checking the understanding of instructions which say ‘Guess your partner’s answers to the true or false questions below’ you could ask ‘Do you

need to speak to your partner at this stage?’

The main reason to do so: Because it’s another way of checking understanding.

By Rafael Ferreira and Sergio Hideki Kanie