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.
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.
Which of these two sentences below would be more fun for you to answer?
1) What is one significant event that happened in the world this past year?
2) What is one significant event that happened to you this past year?
Which of those two sentences would be more fun for you to hear your friend answer?
Which of those two sentences would be more likely to help you internalize the word “significant”?
It seems that the second one tends to be much more stimulating for students to answer. And, on top of that, it seems be the type of question which will help students retain the meaning of the word.
A few years ago, I started to add an additional vocabulary exercise titled “Applied Vocabulary” to the more traditional ones that I was assigning my students. In this, each new vocabulary word is embedded in a personal question about the students’ lives and experiences. For example:
(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)
It can seem like our students have about a 20-second attention span. So we try to squeeze in introductions to new Writing units during that period of time before they start thinking about text messages, their lunch, tonight’s date, last night’s date …
There is an effective and stimulating method for getting students to immediately interact with a new Writing unit through a listening activity. We want them to feel engaged as they focus on the format and techniques that they will use when they eventually write an essay in this mode. This approach does it in a user-friendly, enjoyable way. Also, a side benefit is that students internalize some new sentence styles and new vocabulary.
(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)
One of the most common grammar questions I’ve been asked by students or tutors whom I’ve trained or new teachers whom I’ve mentored concerns sentences like:
“While eating our dinner, we enjoyed the sunset.” [Subordinator (While) + Verb-ing (eating).]
Question: Grammatically speaking, what is “eating”?
It’s called a reduced form. The writer is reducing an adverb clause to a phrase.
Original sentence: While we were eating our dinner, we enjoyed the sunset.
Reduced form: While eating our dinner, we enjoyed the sunset.
We can use these with subordinators like before, after, while and since.
This phrase can come at the beginning of a sentence as in the example above and in the title of this post or in the middle of a sentence:
She bumped into a chair while she was looking at her smartphone.
She bumped into a chair while looking at her smartphone.
“David, Please report to the Director’s office as soon as your class finishes. He needs to talk to you.” A program assistant handed me a note with those sentences on it. Gulp!
In the early 1980s, my wife and I, without much thought, accepted teaching positions on the Greek island of Lesbos. It was a Greek island, so what could possible go wrong?
It was a prep school that high school students attended in the late afternoons/evenings after high school to study English. Shortly after arriving, we met one of the teachers whom we were replacing. He told us that the school had a lot of discipline problems because many of the students didn’t want to be there. He said that the teacher-turnover was quite high as a result. In fact, a couple of teacher had just disappeared a few months earlier.
On the first day of class, as we walked down the hallway, we could see students literally chasing each other around the class rooms and jumping on the desks. My first class was with 16 tenth-grade students. Although most of the students paid little attention to me but instead continued to chat as I started the lesson, there were three female students sitting in the front row appearing eager to begin. Those three became the focus of my attention. Gradually, most of the others started to engage in the lesson, while a couple slept or doodled or looked out the window.
(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)
This “tool” has helped me remain calm in many stressful teaching situations. Without this, I probably would have changed careers many years ago. I discovered this tool during my first month of teaching ESL when I was in Africa in the Peace Corps.
Here is what happened that first time in Africa. One day early in the term, I was conducting a lesson in a class of 35 students. Sitting in the front row were two popular students, Kato (the class president) and his best friend, Abdula. They were have a good time privately whispering and laughing while I was explaining the lesson. I could tell the other students had noticed them, so I knew I had to do something before the other students would start talking and I’d lose control of the class. Because Kato and Abdula were popular, I knew that I could alienate the other students if I didn’t handle this situation delicately. I could feel my stomach churning and blood pressure rising. Probably many teachers would have the same initial inclination that I had which would be to just tell them to stop talking. But what if I did that, and they continued talking? Then what could I do? I decided to not say anything right then and to think about it after class.
