Good Practice

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Teaching tips – a few ideas for good practice

A few minutes before the lesson starts

Greet students and ask them about their day/weekend, etc

Board something that can get students to think about the lesson

Homework review

Get students to compare their answers in pairs or groups.

Nominate students and board the correct answers. This gives students who might
arrive late the opportunity to look up the answers they missed.

On the board

Grammar forms and functions.

Clear, organized and highlighted differences to make it easy for students to see.
Examples of use of target language in positive, negative and question forms are
also useful. The teacher would be able to point to these to prompt students when
needed.

Vocabulary

At higher levels, encouraging students to identify the different classes of words,


highlighting the affixes and boarding examples of their use in a sentence or
question so students could personalize their use, either by saying whether the
sentences were true for themselves or asking each other the questions would
help consolidate learning.
Pronunciation

Group and individual drills and back-chaining to be employed.

At higher levels the teacher can also get students to use the words/expressions in
a sentence so they get more of a sense of fluency and accuracy eg to threaten –
She threatened to tell my parents if I didn’t help her. Noun form – a threat.
Terrorist attacks are a threat to national security.

Board phonemes and identify stressed syllables.

Instructions

Clear nomination of pairs for exercises/activities. Break instructions down into


steps and ask students ICQs to ascertain they know exactly what to do. Ask both
strong and weak students to confirm they understand.

During an activity

Monitor and encourage students.

Encourage a healthy rapport in class with some peer teaching. Mix up pairs,
move students around (even when they moan and groan about it!)

Feedback after an exercise

Get students to check their answers in pairs before checking in class as a whole.
This gives the students the opportunity to use the target language, help them
work out the correct form and function. Encourage students to justify their
chosen answers even if they have the same ones but even more so if their
answers were different from one another’s.

Encourage students to use the target language when getting feedback.


Lead-in to a listening activity

To generate interest and to motivate – ask students to talk about their personal
experiences or opinion of the topic. Giving own examples might also encourage
students to share more.

To help students better understand what they are going to hear -

It’s always useful to look through the tape-script to consider whether students
might struggle with some expressions, either due to unfamiliarity or subtle shift of
usual meaning and to pre-teach these.

Listening

Get the students to compare their answers before playing the recording a second
time. This not only generates more student-talk-time, but also helps them to look
out for the correct answers when they listen again. Get students to look at the
tapescript when they have listened twice – this helps with independent learning;
encourage them to notice synonyms, etc..

Demand-high

Highlight examples of complex expressions from the audio. This could be further
consolidated by boarding an example and getting students to personalize the use
of it. For example – ‘X’ was nowhere near as exciting as ‘Y’ – check students
understood the meaning of nowhere near – big difference and substitute the Xs
and Ys.

Encourage students to use all the positive, negative and question forms of the
target language during feedback and nominate pairs across the room. This should
keep students focused and on their toes particularly when it is a big group.
Group discussions

When to have them?

After a reading or listening task as it provides students with material to refer to


and can generate a lot of student talk time.

Organisation

Get students to nominate a time-keeper, scribe and discussion leader who has to
ensure that everyone in the group has had an opportunity to speak.

Give students one or two minutes to recap in their groups before getting
feedback.

Nominate random students rather than the scribe to give feedback from their
groups as this can keep students on their toes.

Error correction

When to correct?

When the error is related to the target language, correct the student by
prompting them to use the correct form as soon as they make the mistake.

Where the error does not cause problems in communication the teacher should
make a note of it, probably along with other errors made by other students in the
class and address them before the end of the lesson.

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