Teaching English for the first time: general advice

This continues from my first post about teaching English and my post about lesson planning.

Here are some additional, general pieces of advice.

Control your language

One very important skill you will learn 'on the job' is how to grade your own language. You will need to learn how to speak more clearly, to use simpler grammar and vocabulary, and to explain things clearly, with examples.

A lot of students say they can't understand their new foreign teacher. The new teacher, without realising it, is firing off sentences far too quickly, without understanding what students will and won't understand.

This is a problem for many a beginning teacher. We use heaps of idioms and figures of speech in our everyday speaking, without even realising it. It does take some practice, but once you get used to it, you can modulate your language according to each new student. If you see a new student and you don't know their level, you can greet them with very simple English. If they respond in a halting way, you'll know to keep your language very simple. If they speak smoothly and confidently, you can ask your next questions a little more naturally, and give more information yourself. After a few exchanged sentences, you can get a very rough feel for the kind of level of English you can use with that student.

Some tips for speaking to low-level students:
-For low level students, stick to simple questions. If they're struggling a lot, offer example answers. ('Where are you from?' (pause) 'Are you from Yokohama? Tokyo?')
-Say a few words and then pause to give time to process. It takes a while for beginners to mentally translate sentences.
-Smooth the way by using example words that are same in Japanese and English (burger, beer, Japanese city names). Obviously works less well if you don't know any Japanese or which words are similar!

As you get more experience, you'll get more of a feel for things students will and won't know. But bear in mind that most of your students will have learned English through classes and textbooks, so even higher level students may not have very good grasp of idioms.

Keep your instructions clear

Similar to 'controlling your language', when you explain tasks to students, keep it simple and to the point. For lower level students, use gestures and examples to help show your meaning. Also, keep the students with you as you explain the important things.

Example bad explanation: 'Okay, I'd like you guys to form pairs and practise page 50 from the textbook, one of you is gonna ask the other the questions from the top half of the page, and the other is gonna ask the bottom questions; after you finish I want you to solve this puzzle using the answers from the previously answered questions. Okay?'

Example good explanation: 'Okay, please open your book. Look at page 50.' (hold up the book to show the page, wait for students to open)
'Now, you are partners.' (gesturing to each student, putting them in pairs with your gesture) 'You're A, B. A, B.'
'Student A. Please ask your partner these questions.' (gesture to the questions)
'Student B. Please ask your partner these questions.' (gesture)
-(get students to do the exercise)-
'Okay! Now, look at the bottom of the page, here. (gesture) What's the answer to this puzzle?...

Notice the short sentences, the pauses for students to follow you, the gestures, and the delivering key information only at the appropriate moment. Of course, with higher-level classes, you don't want to dumb it down this much, and you can reduce the number of gestures. Still, even with them, you don't want to clutter your most important explanations with lots of unnecessary talking; they'll be straining to work out exactly what you're asking and to get the most important info.

If the exercise is not completely straightforward, you may also want to demonstrate how to do the exercise, by pairing up with a partner and asking them the first question or two from the exercise.

If you are totally new to teaching, I'd recommend actually practising this style of speaking yourself before going in front of a class. You might think 'oh, that sounds so easy', but until you're used to it, you'll likely find yourself putting in lots of 'well, let's see here...'s and 'what I'm gonna ask you to do's and 'oh and if you wouldn't mind...'s. Similarly, you could practise how you would explain the difference between two words, or the meaning of certain vocab words, in a really simple and clear way.

Check students' understanding

After you have explained something, unless the meaning could not possibly be misunderstood, check the students understand it!

For example, if you've just explained the difference between 'his' and 'him', write up a few short example sentences on the board, with gaps ('This is ___ book', 'I talked to ___ yesterday', etc). Get students to try to supply the missing words.

Or if you have just given students an exercise to do, you can check their understanding. 'So, what are you going to write?' 'Are you going to write, or just speak?'

Speaking together

Get students to work in pairs or small groups. Give them as much speaking time as possible. Unless you have a small class, try to limit activities where you ask every member of the class a question, or get every person to report back on what they talked about. Students in pairs get to talk more, and practise more.

If you are doing pairwork, and you have an odd number of students, you must decide whether to make a group of three, or to partner one of the students yourself. If you do the former, try to arrange it so that different people make a group of 3 in each activity. (Obviously, students in a group of 3 get less individual time to talk/practise.) If you do the latter, again, try to partner yourself with different students for different activities, and take pauses to check on the progress of other students.

Drilling

Don't be shy about drilling the students. It might seem boring to you, to have them repeat the same sentences several times. But if you've ever learned a language, you'll know that sometimes you just need to get your mouth used to saying the words! 

Correcting students

When students are doing freer conversation, try not to interject and correct their every utterance. In my experience, Japanese students usually *do* want to be corrected if they are making errors, but choose your battles, so as not to discourage them with excessive corrections. If they can't express themselves or really foul up some language, correct them, but if they just leave out a 'the' or 'a', let it slide (unless 'the' and 'a' is the point of the lesson).

When you correct students, here are some handy ideas:

Get them to 'see' the error for themselves. For example, repeat back their error, emphasising the wrong word. ('He HAVE a car?') Or ask a question about it. ('You HAVE WORKED in Osaka last year? Do you work there now? No? Okay, how can we say this?')

Get them to repeat the correct sentence.

After the exercise has finished, put a few sentences you overheard on the board. Get students to look at them themselves and work out which are correct and incorrect.

If someone is making a common error, or several people make the same error, write it up on the board and get students to correct it and think about what the correct English is.

In my experience, many Japanese students have struggled with English learning precisely because they are not confident about just practising whatever language they think of, taking risks, making mistakes. In school, a lot of them practised endless reading and grammar, without much conversation practice. This means that what a lot of students most need is the chance to speak a lot and improve their fluency. Of course they should be helped to speak *correctly*, but be careful you don't correct them SO much that they can't get any flow going.

Nobody is speaking!

It depends on your class. Some classes will be a buzz of confident energy, where conversation flows freely. In other classes, getting any response from anybody will be like pulling teeth. What do you do in this situation?

I can tell you there is no easy answer, but some tips:
-get students speaking in pairs simultaneously; if several people are talking at the same time, nobody feels self-conscious about their voice being heard by the whole class.
-limit the number of questions you ask the class as a whole. Or, ask the questions, but provide the answer within a few seconds.*
-if their silence stems from lack of creativity or ideas, put up some ideas on the board.
-teach them how to ask a variety of questions. Teach them how to answer, and then add extra information. (Eg, if someone asks 'do you like video games?', don't just say 'yes'. You would go on to talk about what games you like, how often you play, etc.)

-make sure their silence is not caused by total lack of comprehension of the material. If students are in a class that is far too advanced for them (unfortunately, a common occurrence, at least in my experience), there may not be much you can do, except try to schedule bits of respite in the lesson where students can freely use language they *do* know confidently to talk about familiar topics.

*(This is not always recommended; sometimes students genuinely need a long time to understand the question and formulate an answer. You want to give these students the time to think it through. But in other cases, students just don't want to speak out in front of a whole class, especially when they are not confident about their answer. If you have such a class, don't spend half an hour fruitlessly waiting for answers to questions.)

Sometimes you do everything you can and they still don't talk much (in my experience, the worst situation is where you have a class of 3 shy people, because you can't just put them in pairs and get them to ignore their other classmates).