Ten Tips For New ESL Teachers
Are you a new ESL teacher ready to host your first ESL class or English conversation group? Maybe you’ve had a group for a while, but something seems to be missing? Here are 10 tried and true suggestions for how to help your students (and you!) thrive in your English language classes.
Tip One - Make Sure Your Students Feel Comfortable
Take plenty of extra time, especially during your very first session, to make sure your students feel comfortable with you, with their classmates, and with the space. Look for fun icebreaker activities suitable for their level of English.
A good activity for the first class meeting is to introduce yourself, then let students introduce themselves to each other, then to the full class. Building rapport with your students will help you build strong relationships, as they get to know and trust you as their teacher.
Tip Two - Make Your Classroom a Safe Space
Make your classroom a safe place to learn and practice new English skills. Adults learning a second language can become fearful of trying to speak in case they “do it wrong.” Students are usually aware the moment they speak incorrectly. Give them time to correct themselves and encourage them when they just don’t know. Many mistakes can be overlooked, except for the mistakes that coincide with that day’s lesson content.
I once had a student tell me that the people who made fun of her attempts to speak English were not the native speakers she came into contact with, but her own circle of compatriots who spoke her language. English class was the place she felt safe. Encourage your learners to ask questions and actively participate in the lesson, and make sure they know that any question is a good question.
Tip Three - Develop Classroom Routines
Classroom routines will go a long way to help your students feel comfortable in your classroom. Introduce the lesson and tell them what they can hope to learn from it. It’s good to have a set schedule of activities, though a little deviation from the routine can also be fun and surprising. One of the most important routines to develop is how you begin your classes. Do you begin exactly on time? Or do you have an opening activity while you wait for latecomers?
At the end of your class time, review the day’s lesson with a game or activity so students can wind down and relax, knowing it’s almost time to go home. We all like to know what is going to happen next – that’s another way your students can be comfortable in your class.
Tip Four - Speak Slowly and Clearly
When I was learning Italian, my number one complaint was that the speakers spoke way too fast! I couldn’t understand much, and I soon lost interest. This tip for new ESL teachers is to be aware of the rate of your speech and adjust it to the needs of your learners.
It may feel strange to slow down the rate of your speech, but it’s essential for your beginners and even your lower intermediate students. As they progress, you can (and should) speak at a more normal pace. Pause and check yourself often – it’s easy to begin at a slow pace and speed up without even realizing it. Also, if you purposefully speak more slowly, it gives you time to consider the vocabulary you are using and adjust it in real time to the level of your students’ understanding.
Tip Five - Make Things Visual
Conventional wisdom says that the more senses you can use, the easier it is to remember something. For example, if a student reads something written on the board, and hears the teacher say it, he is using sight and hearing. However, don’t forget about the other three senses – taste, smell, and touch! Taste and smell can be tough, but if you’re learning the word “casserole,” for example, bring pictures of different kinds of casseroles that might engage students’ imaginations.
Some students learn best visually, so pictures, gestures, and even charades can go a long way to helping them remember. And the sillier the charade, the more memorable it can be.
Make a bulletin board with various nouns and verbs with both pictures and words. Of course this works well for beginners, with words like “chair” and “shirt,” but you can also use this idea for higher level students as they learn to distinguish different kinds of words, like “folding chair,” “recliner,” “rocking chair,” etc.
Tip Six - Mistakes Can Be a Good Way to Learn
Most adult students are petrified of making mistakes in front of you and their classmates. They think they should understand everything about everything before they open their mouth to speak. Now that you’ve made your classroom a safe space, encourage them to try! If they make a mistake, kudos to them for giving it a shot. When they make a mistake, instead of telling them the right answer, coax them into remembering it for themselves. This tip for new ESL teachers encourages you to let students, in effect, take charge of their own learning.
One day, I was driving and saw another of those beautiful flowering trees that I could never remember the name of. I had looked up the name countless times, but this time I was determined to remember it on my own. It took a day or so of racking my brain, but I finally dragged the name of that tree out of the black hole of my memory. And guess what? I haven’t forgotten the name of that tree since – a crepe myrtle.
It will take a lot of patience not to just pop in with the correct answer for your students’ mistakes. By coaxing them to remember the right vocabulary word or verb tense, you are 1) helping them to not forget again, and 2) making your classroom a safe place to make mistakes.
Tip Seven - Check For Understanding
If you present a new grammar topic, then ask, “Do you understand?” or “Does that make sense?”, all your students have to do is nod and say “yes.” They might have no idea what you just said. Perhaps they don’t want to inconvenience you by saying they don’t understand, or they may be too shy to admit their confusion in front of their classmates. Instead of asking them if they understand after you present a new concept or give an instruction, pause and watch for signs of confusion or hesitation.
Use practice exercises that can help them apply their new skill. That way, even if they have not understood your explanation, they can absorb the new skill by seeing it used. Write a million examples of the new grammar on the board. Write one incorrectly and ask if anyone can spot the mistake. If they are doing a worksheet at their desks, walk around the room and ask them how they are doing. They may feel more comfortable asking you a question one-on-one.
Tip Eight - Learn About Your Students' Cultural Background
To effectively engage your students, you will need to create lessons that are useful to them in their everyday lives. Ask them about their jobs, or their home situations, and if they have a need for specific vocabulary (such as how to interact with a child’s teacher at school). Become familiar with the basics of their culture so you can help them relate new vocabulary and concepts to their own life experiences.
Take time to learn about their cultural beliefs and backgrounds, both to teach them the English they need for their situations, and to get to know them better as people who live in your community, not just as students you see once or twice a week. Consider using your last scheduled class meeting to have a potluck, where students bring a traditional dish from their culture to share. When my school did this, many students participated and it was a special time of sharing things that were important to us, students and teachers alike, as well as a great setting to practice conversational English.
Tip Nine - Incorporate Technology
Like it or not, we live in a digital world. If your students come to your classroom without much experience in using a computer or even typing, consider incorporating some of these technologies into your class to help them in their daily lives.
All but one of the adult students in my class had a cell phone, so one great app you could try is Kahoot. It takes a little preparation on your part, but Kahoot is a free competition-based game that could make a great ending activity for your class time.
Also try preparing material via Quizlet, so your learners may be more motivated to practice their English outside of class time. There are many other apps and games that can help your learners – search online for the one that will work best for you.
Tip Ten - Make Your Classroom a Fun Place to Be!
In many ways, English is an easy language to learn. Nouns have no gender to memorize, verbs don’t change for each subject (except the third person singular in the present tense), and nouns and adjectives never change their form (except to make nouns plural). However, casual spoken English can be a little more challenging because of all the slang words and expressions, as well as phrasal verbs.
But don’t worry! This is where you can have some fun with your students as you introduce them to casual spoken English, where native speakers tend to massacre good pronunciation and make up new words. In one lesson, I was teaching my intermediate students about the suffix “-less,” meaning “without,” and reviewing words like “harmless” and “endless.” I mentioned that native speakers often stick “-less” at the ends of random words that aren’t in the dictionary, like using “cookie-less” to mean that you don’t have any cookies. The class thought this was totally weird, but amusing. One of them said, “So if I don’t have a car, I’m carless?” This simple lesson engaged them, challenged them to think about English in a new way, and they had a lot of fun.
Conclusion - Engage!
Engaging with your adult students on a more personal level can help all of you enjoy class meetings. You’ll all learn new things, and not just English! I hope these tips will help you as you begin to reach out to people where you live with English and the gospel.
