Learn Your Roles and Duties
Teaching ESL can make for a demanding career. You have to learn your duties, responsibilities and everyday chores. If you’re unsure, speak to the director of the school or language institute you work at. Consult with the more experienced teachers who are working there. Get to know the premises, the equipment and the materials you’re expected to use.
Talk to colleagues, read relevant websites and visit teacher forums or blogs so that possible questions you have about your role can all be answered.
Follow the 3 P’s
The 3 p’s are: plan ahead, prepare, practice.
You need to plan ahead and write a lesson plan before every lesson. Take into account your students, the available time and the material and resources you have at your disposal.
You should remember that the more detailed your lesson plan, the more effective and less stressed out you’ll feel. In other words, the key to a stress-free teaching experience is to figure out your warm-up, presentation and production activities before class. What about the follow-up activities that you’ll assign?
Your teaching practice will be safeguarded and more effective if you plan and prepare carefully. Once you’ve gotten all that sorted out, take the time to rehearse parts of your lesson. Practice by doing a quick read-through of major talking points and estimating how long it’ll take your students to understand, absorb and complete certain lessons and activities. Time yourself. This will ensure that your classes never run short or long.
Be Realistic but Ambitious
You always want to be ambitious and get your students to learn even more information. You want challenge them and really push them to do their absolute best.
However, you’ll need to strike a careful balance here. Get to know your learners and their ages, backgrounds, skills, English levels and learning styles. From there, try to be realistic. What kinds of activities, tasks and learning goals can you set for them so that their language skills are significantly strengthened?
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