An article by Hernán Giannini. Please click here to download the FREE PDF.
How can I motivate my students to read? What materials can I use to supplement the textbook? Will this role-play activity help my students gain fluency?
There are just a few examples of my wonderings as English teachers. For all my 200 followers and all teachers from this fantastic site I would like to share with you 100 tips on different teaching aspects to help you reflect upon your practice. I hope you find them useful to make your classes more challenging, motivating and effective.
- Create a positive learning environment.
- Planning is the key to success.
- Avoid free time. Overplan if necessary.
- Make your classes enjoyable and profitable.
- Make use of the class period efficiently.
- Show a positive attitude and respect for your students and their environment.
- Divide the class into two or three activities.
- Keep your students actively involved in the class subject.
- Have two or three follow up activities prepared.
- Tell the students your expectations regarding discipline and respect.
- Identify goals and objectives of your lesson plan.
- Include one or two alternative activities in case something does not go well or students finish early.
- Begin the lesson with a low-stress warm-up task that involves all the students (low-stress means something all students can do or review).
- Don’t stick religiously to your lesson plan. Be flexible and willing to change plans when you think it appropriate.
- Make the lesson as interactive as possible to keep the students focused and involved in learning.
- Consider adapting the material suggested in the ready-make plan your course book provides to suit your students’ needs.
- Include different types of activities to cater for different learning styles.
- End the lesson plan with review activities.
- Fit the lesson plan to the students and not the students to the plan.
- Evaluate your plan after the class is over; keep a notebook and jot down what went well and what did not.
- Gather all the material you may need in class,before the class begins. Be organized!
- Bring authentic material and realia into your lessons whenever possible (magazines, newspapers, objects) in order to help your students gain confidence in real situations.
- Present material using different techniques: written, oral, games, a video scene, etc.
- Use props and visual aids (flashcards, posters, graphs, picture cards, photographs and maps) to get the students’ attention when you present or review concepts.
- Adapt the material to fit your students’ needs and address specific learning goals.
- Use audio or audio-visual resources as well. Exposure to spoken English is essential for students to develop their listening skills.
- Don’t neglect dictionary work. If you teach students to use the dictionaries effectively, you help them develop their learning autonomy.
- If possible, integrate the computer and the internet into your classes. They have become a valuable teaching tool for students of all levels and ages.
- Pace the delivery of the material and don’t rush through it. Let your students give it thought.
- The more interested you show in your material, the more likely the students will see value in it.
- Present grammar in both form and meaning.
- Give brief and simple explanations, and use the mother tongue T if necessary (for foreign teachers tip)
- Provide clear and contextualized examples.
- Use charts and diagrams to show grammatical relationships.
- Do not interfere with fluency by focusing too much on grammar.
- Focus on strategies that are difficult to produce without mistakes.
- Never give too many rules or examples. Students may get confused.
- Provide activities that will make students use a certain grammar point.
- Give the rule and ask students to provide examples (deductive reasoning) or give examples and elicit the rule from the students (inductive reasoning).
- Use games to make grammar practice funnier.
- Teach the correct pronunciation and spelling of new vocabulary items.
- Give grammatical information about the new item. For example, when teaching a verb, give also its past and past participle form.
- Provide collocations of a new item. For example, to take/make a step.
- Help the students guess the meaning of new items from context.
- Use concrete examples with young learners, and more abstract definitions with older learners.
- Help students make meaning or sound associations to remember new items.
- Use brainstorming to present or revise items.
- Encourage students to find the vocabulary learning strategies that best work for them.
- If a concept is too difficult to explain in English, use translations for those foreign teachers.
- Teach new items at the beginning of the lesson; review them later in the lesson, and again in the next class.
- Prepare students before listening anything.
- Introduce the subject of the listening piece through pictures or any cue you may find appropriate.
- Explain any new word they are going to listen to.
- Do a brainstorming session about the subject of the listening practice. They will be more prepared to follow the main ideas.
- Help them predict what they are going to listen to. Later they confirm their guesses.
- Listening for a foreign student is a difficult skill, so build students’ confidence gradually. If they recognize words and ideas, they will be much more motivated.
- Give them a reason for listening. Acting, completing an exercise, etc. will give them a reason for listening.
- Keep instructions easy and clear. Try to avoid misunderstandings and consequent frustration.
- Don’t use a listening that it is too long. Students will lose interest.
- Remember you are the first model they listen to. Prepare your listening practice in advance and check the right pronunciation of the words you feel doubtful about.
- Make sure students identify their purpose in reading: for information, for pleasure, etc.
- Train the students to look for the overall meaning of a text instead of trying to understand every word.
- Focus on the importance of reading to expand vocabulary and to improve writing skills.
- Provide a variety of reading tasks according to the text type and the reading purpose.
- Use a combination of bottom-up (decoding words, phrases and sentences) and top-down techniques (previous knowledge, expectations).
- Encourage students to guess the meaning of unknown words from context. They should use the dictionary as a last resource, to confirm or revise their guesses.
- Structure the reading lesson into before reading, while reading and after reading stages. This will help you make the most of the text and integrate different skills.
- Help students develop effective reading strategies: prediction (to anticipate content), skimming (to get the main idea), scanning (to look for specific information), etc.
- Combine intensive reading (short texts, in class, focus on details) and extensive reading (longer texts, out of class, focus on global meaning).
- Encourage silent reading to increase reading speed. Faster readers become effective readers.
- Allow students enough listening practice before asking them to speak to build up their confidence.
- Avoid making students feel afraid of making mistakes. Help them see mistakes as part of their learning process.
- Teach classroom language so that students are able to interact in English for the very beginning.
- Give speaking activities that are relevant to students’ age and interests.
- Use simulations and role play for students to practice speaking in a variety of situations and acquire fluency.
- Encourage the development of speaking strategies, such as asking for repetition or clarification, using fillers, etc., to help your students become competent speakers.
- Provide pair and group work to enhance real interaction, to foster autonomy and make classes more active.
- Always give positive feedback and emphasize progress so that students are more motivated to speak.
- Give oral homework activities, such as memorizing a dialogue, recording an oral diary, etc., for students to have out-of-class speaking practice.
- Emphasize that you will assess oral performance continuously so that students try to talk more.
- Emphasize the importance of reading. The habit of reading will give your students the necessary tools to form their background information.
- Support and encourage your students to write frequently and regularly.
- Never use writing as a form of punishment.
- Never give negative feedback about students’ pieces of writing.
- Give your students plenty of practice. Writing everyday will help them improve.
- Suggest topics related to their own lives and experiences. Their motivation and ownership will increase.
- The main objective is effective communication of an idea. Don’t worry about correctness. Students are just learning to write.
- Encourage students to keep a diary to help them structure their thought and give a chance to write freely.
- Let your students read their pieces of writing aloud.
- Publish their writings on the walls of the classroom; share it with students in other classes or their families. This will make their writing meaningful.
Assessment and Feedback
- Reinforce right answers and be tactful when correcting mistakes.
- Whenever possible, elicit the correction from the student who made the mistake.
- In fluency work, avoid correcting mistakes. Students may feel discouraged to speak if they are interrupted.
- Give supportive and informative feedback on written assignments. For example, write short comments on what is particularly good, and what needs improvement or redoing.
- Emphasize the importance of doing the homework for the overall evaluation of students’ performance.
- Keep updated to your students’ improvement through short weekly assignments.
- Combine formal testing and continuous assessment to obtain a better idea of your students’ progress.
- Involve students in the evaluation process, using different techniques, such as self and peerassessment or even asking them to help you design a test.
- Keep an assessment record of every student including information about language skills, participation, progress, homework, etc.
- Make sure that your criterion is clear to students. They will have better results if they know what you expect from them.
Brown, H Douglas (2001) Teaching by principles. An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. Addison Wesley, Longman Inc.
Nuttal, C (1982) Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language, Heinemann.
Seligson, Paul (1997) Helping Students to Speak. Richmond Publishing.
Ur, Penny (1996) A Course in Language Teaching.
Cambridge University Press.
An article by Hernán Giannini. Please click here to download the FREE PDF.
© Hernán Giannini 2012. Reproduced by Help Me Teach with permission.