Teaching English for the first time (part 1)

As I mentioned in my recent post about eikaiwa, a lot of teachers come to teach English for the first time, without previous teaching experience. Generally the company provides training, but what if you need to teach outside of your school's methodology? What if you have to design your own lesson for the first time? What if you get a new job using a different teaching style, but you don't get training in it?

I'll give some tips for people who find themselves having to teach for the first time.

I have moved most of this post into my new blog, ESL Ideas - so click here for my other ideas.

It's not just grammar

If you teach at an eikaiwa, generally the lessons have a particular grammar or functional language goal. However, English lessons need not be only about these things. What about teaching skills? That is, reading, writing, speaking, listening.

For example, your students can probably read English better than they can speak it. But a lot of students read slowly, word-by-word. Can they skim-read a page to find a piece of information they need? Can they take a quick look at an article and get the gist of it without having to reach for the dictionary every second word?

Eikaiwa usually have a lot of focus on speaking practice, but how about some practice in simply communicating your meaning effectively? Where students are allowed to make mistakes without being corrected every time, just for fluency's sake?

I have written more on teaching English for the first time... see the next post for lesson planning ideas.