by Les Zsoldos

Created on: January 29, 2007   Last Updated: May 14, 2007

I would like to give a few tips to all those who teach English as a second language. They are based on my personal experiences in the ESL classroom. By putting them into practice, they helped me to become a better instructor.

When I first started teaching, I made the mistake of talking too much. The result was that students didn't have enough opportunities to speak. Students need to have as many opportunities to speak as possible, especially in a conversation class.

At the beginning of my teaching career, I often let one student dominate classroom discussion to the disadvantage of other students. As I became more experienced, I learned to control the classroom better and tried to give every student plenty of opportunities to speak. For me, one effective approach for generating questions from all corners of the classroom was simply to move around and look at different students to generate questions. When dividing my students into pairs and groups, I made sure that I mixed the pairs and groups so that students would have different partners to make the activities more interesting.

I was also impatient. If my students didn't answer my question promptly, I answered it for them. Unfortunately, this didn't really encourage them to speak because they knew that if they waited a few seconds, I'd answer the question for them. Over time, I learned to be patient in the classroom.

I often echoed a student's answer, unaware that I was doing this. It especially occurred with soft-spoken students. To correct this, I learned to move away from the quieter students in the classroom when they were speaking. By doing this, they automatically seemed to speak more loudly so that I didn't need to echo their responses to the rest of the class.

I believed in the importance of error correction but learned to become very subtle about it. To ensure that no student felt uncomfortable, I decided to correct errors in a very diplomatic way. Sometimes I used humour. For example, I'd put a mistake up on the blackboard and pretend I didn't know why it was wrong. The result was that students were usually very eager to share their knowledge.

I found it was not necessary to teach every grammar rule implicitly. Many of the rules could simply be taught by example. But I also discovered that it very important to model exercises clearly so that students know exactly what is expected of them. Many were often too shy to admit that a concept was unclear, so I made sure to check for comprehension.

Oral drills were very effective when starting a class because everyone had to speak and could do so with confidence. By doing them quickly, I realized students did not have time to translate from their native language, but rather, were forced to think in the target language.

This also helped them to develop a natural speaking speed. Making them think in the target language was my goal because I knew that the mastery of language is a habit-forming process in which we don't think about the rules of the language but use them naturally and automatically.

Many tips can be given to those who teach English as a second language. As I acquired experience, I learned to be patient and diplomatic with error correction. The result was that my classes became more interactive, my students developed more confidence, and I became a better instructor.

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