Author Archives: commonsenseesl

• ESL Teachers’ Gift to Students: Silence

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Cover Silence man

I’m experiencing life as a L2 learner for four hours. One of our colleagues, Susan, has volunteered to teach eight of us ESL teachers beginning Farsi for professional development. After we have learned some basics, she does an oral “drill”. She calls on me, and I feel some pressure to respond quickly not wanting to make everyone wait. To my relief, though, Susan patiently remains silent while I formulate my answer.

As she calls on others, I become aware of how I am feeling. To my surprise, unlike how I imagined my ESL students feeling in these situations, I , as an L2 learner, am not restlessly yearning for a faster pace. Instead, I appreciate the chance to formulate responses in my own mind, and when I’m called on again, I feel my stress level diminish.

 According to research, many of us ESL teachers find silence to be uncomfortable. And this can result in loss opportunities.

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• Introducing any ESL Lesson: FIVE Effective Ways

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I need to start by making a confession. After I had been teaching ESL for about 10 years, I suddenly realized that I had become a bit careless about something important.

Here is what happened. As I mentioned, I was in my 10th year of teaching ESL, and I was asked to teach a course to American university students who wanted to become ESL teachers. One day, I planned to demonstrate a lesson. The first thing I decided that I need to tell them is that it’s really important to have a good introduction to the lesson. You don’t just want to tell students, open your books to page 23. Your assignment is to do Ex 4 and 5.

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But wait! That is exactly how I had been starting my ESL classes recently. I realized that in my effort to get the lesson started, I had stopped doing a very important first step. And as a result, I missed an opportunity to stimulate and motivate my student.

So as I prepared to show my teacher-training students ways that they could introduce lessons, I returned to my days as a beginning teacher and started to use them once again with my ESL students. And I have to tell you, the results were amazing. I could see it in my students’ faces how much more energized and eager they were to do the activities. And I felt not only excited about teaching them but also confident in the importance of the activities they were about to do.

Perhaps the greatest motivator for students is feeling like they are working toward something worthwhile and are doing something important. We can satisfy this need in students by explaining the reason for the assignment.

So here are four great techniques that you can use to introduce your lessons.

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• Going Beyond Learning Language Skills in ESL Courses.

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Cover Integ Revised going beyondIt’s understandable that ESL teachers would like to include something more than language-skill development in their courses. However, this desire can become a mission which can override the real needs of the students.

Teachers who have a passion about a topic, for example, the environment, social justice, animal rights, racism, and technology, can feel, as one colleague explained, “This topic is very important for all students to know about.” This can lead to a theme for a course in which the focus of each lesson is about that topic as students read, write and talk about it and learn the specialized vocabulary connected to it.

A problem can arise when the theme starts to overshadow skill building. For example,
when working on reading skills, if a reading passage has “important” content but is above the students’ reading levels, the teacher will “orally” explain what they read. Students are evaluated on how much they knew about the content rather than on their language-skills development.

As another example, if the conversation or discussion skill that is supposed to be developed during the course isn’t naturally applicable to the theme, it may not be practiced.

Teachers at the next level might find students with a lot of knowledge about causes of air pollution or the challenges of recycling or discrimination in hiring practices or the potential of AI or social media, but weak language skills.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be an either-or situation; in other words, we don’t have to choose between skill development or content.

Engaging content and skills development. It is possible to have both.

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• Getting Backed Up with ESL Paperwork: Effective Solution

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There seems to be certain times during a term when we can feel a bit overwhelmed by the amount of paperwork coming in. During those times, it makes sense to establish some priorities concerning how we approach “marking” the various assignments.

It’s sometimes tempting to rationalize not giving any feedback on or returning some homework assignments by thinking that there are intrinsic benefits for students to just do the exercises. We say to ourselves that it’s not absolutely vital that they get them back quickly (or even, in some cases, ever). Thus, we might consider doing a “triage” with assignments. Essays might get top priority for our time and attention with “lesser” assignments just filed away or held off until sometime in the future when we are all caught up.

Surprisingly, this feeling of being overwhelmed can actually open up a motivation to respond to homework assignments in a way that is more effective than how we would “normally” do it when we have plenty of time.

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