Category Archives: 01 ❖ TEACHER SUPPORT

• Advice: Don’t Say These 4 Things to Your Students

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Cover Advice don't say these 4 things shot

YouTube This posting is discussed on my YouTube video Don’t Say These 4 Things to Your ESL Students

Everything that we say to our students can have a big impact.  For us ESL instructors that can be exhilarating, but it’s also a big responsibility.  Unfortunately, without realizing it, some instructors are sending the wrong message to students with “innocent” comments.  These are four statements that are in this category.

1) Teacher’s statement: The teacher doesn’t want students to feel stress, so just before handing out the quiz, she says, “This quiz will be easy.”
Message that students get: If a student starts the quiz and notices that it isn’t easy, he’s likely to think, “Wow!  I must be stupid.  This quiz is supposed to be easy.  My classmates probably know all this.”
What the message should be: This is what we can say instead to help them understand the purpose of the quiz: “This quiz will help us see how well you’ve developed your skills so far and what we’ll need to practice more.”

2) Teacher’s statement: The teacher wants to reward students, so he says, “You have all worked so hard this week, so I won’t give you any homework.  I want you all to just enjoy your weekend.”
Message that students get: “Homework is painful.  It just interferes with free time.  It’s best if we can avoid it.”
What the message should be: What we really want to do is give students confidence in our homework assignments, so we can say, “I’ve prepared a homework assignment that will lead you to developing your skills more.  It’s going to help you do well on our assignments  next week and in the class that you will be in next term.”

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• EASY Needs Analysis for What ESL Teachers Should Teach (Needs Analysis) Part 2

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Interview 2 students

In general, teachers can lose credibility in the eyes of their students by asking them what they want to learn.  The teacher is the professional in the room and should know what the students should study.

However, there are situations in which former students’ insights can be valuable.  Surveying these students about what would have been helpful for them to have learned in our classes from their new perspective can give us an awareness of students’ needs beyond our classrooms.

Example of needs-analysis surveys of former students

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• Most Important Process that You can do for Yourself, Your Students, Your Program (Part 1)

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Cover Most important process

This process will give you, your colleagues, administrators, and most of all, your students great confidence in what you and your colleagues are teaching your students.  It will serve as a legitimate basis for the goals and outcomes of your courses.

This empowering process is called a needs analysis.  It is one of the most important things I have ever done as a professional, and I’ve done this everywhere I’ve taught.

And on top of all that, it can be stimulating and rewarding to do.

In brief, a needs analysis in an ESL context means finding out what skills students will need in order to be successful in the future.  The future can be the following term when they will be in the next level of a program; it can be when they finish their ESL instruction and will be in college courses (e..g. English Comp); it can be when they are traveling abroad; it can be when they enter the workforce.

These range from simple surveys of a small group of former students to more involved interviews with college instructors.

How to find out what skills students need to know once they leave our course or our program

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• Non-Credible Rationale for What Teachers Teach

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non credible reason

“I just feel that this is what students need to learn.”
“When I was in college, we had to do that.”

After the second day of a term, a distraught colleague told me that her high-intermediate level writing-students were totally unprepared for her course.   Her course was supposed to build on what they had learned the previous level, but she discovered that the students had little awareness of what a thesis statement was or what topic sentences were.  Many had trouble writing cohesive sentences.

We asked their previous instructor if he had followed the curriculum and worked on these with the students.  He replied that he had decided to have them write a research paper instead.  His reason: “When I was in college, I had to write research papers, so I decide that it was important that they know how to do that.”

Another instructor who was supposed to teach discussion skills for students to use in small groups, instead spent half the term having the student do presentations.  Her reason: “I just felt that it was good for them to do this since they will probably have to do presentations in the future.”

Why these reasons have little or no credibility concerning what/how we should teach ESL

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