Excel at Teaching English: Be a Better ESL Teacher

Why are we ESL trainers important - and increasingly so? This lecture examines that question and sets us up for the lessons to come. As adult learners we need to know WHY we're learning - that's what this lecture answers.

Different learners have different learning styles and different needs-  When we understand these styles and needs, we frame more effective lessons and create a more motivating learning environment. Let's explore this in greater detail together.  Please keep an eye out for the tasks at the end of this section.

A practical activity for you to complete, focusing on the concept of the "good" teacher.

A practical activity for you to complete, looking at how to recognise a "good" teacher.

What exactly is a class library? It can take many different forms, from a selection of books in one corner of the room, to a book box containing a range of readers at slightly different levels.

Relevance is an importance issue when it comes to class libraries.

Let’s briefly examine the topic of class libraries now.

Roll up your sleeves and sharpen your pencil, teachers, because this text lecture has multiple associated activities designed to get you thinking, learning and participating. We need this overview and these tasks to hone our understanding of what we're doing in the classroom, what difficulties our students may face, and how we can best be prepared to assist.

Purpose: this lecture breaks down the elements of English, and sets us up for learning. We touch on adult learning principles (which can be examined in more detail by request - please leave me a note in the Discussion Board). By the end of this lecture we will have refreshed the elements of English, namely the grammar terms, and have them forefront in our minds for the upcoming, detailed lectures.

Transcript of Lecture:

I've been asked by many a newly-qualified ESL trainer: "What on earth is the Present Perfect? Present Simple? Past Continuous???? How can I learn all these terms, Jacqui? I feel stupid sometimes because English is my native language, so why isn't it easy to teach it?"

It's a good question, right? And it's one that I also struggled with as a new trainer. If I can speak the language, why can't I teach it? Because many of us weren't taught the basics of our language in school. And for those of us who never learned a second language, we don't have that sense for the building blocks. Communicating comes automatically ("unconscious competence" to use a term from Noel Burch's Four Stages of Learning, which I encourage you to read up on. Please see the Supplementary Material section for this lecture).

It took me about a year to feel comfortable teaching English, to have a sense of ease with the ins and outs, exceptions to rules and the wibbly-wobbly bumpy bits and pieces. So let's take a look at the structure of our skeleton, and all the fabulous wibbly-wobbly components it has to offer.

Diving right in (and expanding on the information in the previous lecture), we have...

Present

• Present Simple: used for facts, routine, who does what, when, where and how (often) and states
• Present Continuous: what is happening at the moment?
• Questions, Answers, Positives, Negatives, Signal Words (auxiliary verbs / adverbs of frequency)
• Comparisons between the forms + exercises, supplementary material and quizzes!

Perfect

• Present Perfect: what have you done?
• Present Perfect Continuous: what have you been doing?
• Questions, Answers, Positives, Negatives, Signal Words, Common Mistakes
• Comparisons between the forms + exercises, supplementary material and quizzes!

Past

• Past Simple: used for finished time, finished actions and results.
• Past Continuous: used for actions which took place in the past, over a period of time.
• Comparison with Present Perfect (see above).
• Questions, Answers, Positives, Negatives, Signal Words
• Further comparisons between the forms + exercises, supplementary material and quizzes!

Future

• Plans, arrangements, predictions, schedules
• "Will" future (what do you think the world will be like in 20 years?)
• "going to" future (what are you going to do?)
• future continuous (what are you going to do on the weekend?)
• future perfect (what will you have done by the end of the week?)
• Questions, Answers, Positives, Negatives, Signal Words
• Comparisons between the forms + exercises, supplementary material and quizzes!

As mentioned previously:

at every step along the way we will be forming sentences, questions, positive and negative answers;

every lecture comes with explanations, stories, pictures, exercises, activities and a simple question: what more can I do for you?

And one more point: vocabulary will be included in every lecture, and these will also be presented in word lists or word maps.

It is also planned that every lecture will have a business application of the language, so the resources can also be used in business English training programs. These are currently in progress.

So, to recap: In this lecture we have refreshed the elements of English, namely the grammar terms.

Put simply, by the end of this lecture you should have a colourful overview of the English Language, what is going to be covered in this course, and how it is broken up (and why).

Let's begin!

We need to increase our own vocabulary before we can confidently teach English, and part of this is refreshing the basics such as - what is an adjective? an adverb? how can I quickly identify it?

Now, we may have learned this in Primary School but if you're like me, that was last century! And many of us never had these English basics in school. So this lecture will refresh your own vocabulary and set you up for success in the ESL classroom.

This lecture gets into the technical side of English training, the nitty-gritty of working with our learners, understanding their needs, understanding the levels of language competency and how to most effectively start identifying what to teach, when to teach it and with what appropriate activities.

There are four tasks associated with this lecture (which can also be downloaded as a PDF).  To get the most benefit from the information contained in this lecture and the associated tasks, you should share your feedback in the Q&A section, and participate in conversations with your fellow-teachers.

Here's our first of three techniques for introducing new language into the classroom (the others coming up in the following two lectures).  We look at what explanation is, its benefits and drawbacks, and how we go about actually doing it in the classroom.

Please keep in mind that we look at all three techniques before commencing an activity.

The second technique for presenting new language is called elicitation, and we cover the ins and outs in this lecture.

This is the third and final technique for presenting new language to your English students, before which you have a task to complete!

To help you along in your career as an English teacher, I'm providing you with various resources I've created and used over the years. Please feel free to print, photocopy and distribute, but please don't remove my name or copyright.  Of course I won't know if you do or not, but it would create bad karma, and nobody wants that!

This is an audio recording of my sister, Vivienne O'Connell, reading our introduction to the sounds of Present Simple. As with each item of grammar in this course I wrote the text specifically for the Udemy platform, and it forms the basis of exercises which you will find attached to upcoming lectures.

It's aim is to focus your thoughts on this foundation piece of grammar, and is our first step into making you as familiar with it as you are with... well... with something you're very familiar with!

I encourage you to listen and read the associated transcript, which is available as a downloadable resource.

You may use this recording and the transcript in your lessons, but you must credit me. In other words:

© Copyright. Jacqueline Seidel. 2015. May be used for educational purposes without written permission but with a citation to this source.

In this lecture we encounter our foundation stone (or "bone", to continue the Language Skeleton analogy), without which we cannot continue. The Present Simple. We discuss it's purpose, use and signal words. By the end of this lecture you'll be conversant in the basics, which we need in order to continue and add more "bones" to our skeleton.

You may use this material in your lessons, but you must credit me. In other words:

© Copyright. Jacqueline Seidel. 2015. May be used for educational purposes without written permission but with a citation to this source.

In order to more effectively train your ESL students, and to be prepared for any curly questions which may come your way, you've got to know each element of the English Language Skeleton like the back of your hand.

This lecture delves into signal words - the auxiliary verb "do", adverbs of frequency and how we build sentences.

By the end of this lecture you'll be adept at identifying Present Simple, which complements previously-learned knowledge of why we need the Present Simple.

To refresh: for facts, routines, timetables.

Following these knowledge-based lectures we look at practical implementation.

Catering for all learning types (for more information please see the attachment on VARK - also useful in your lesson planning and delivery), this lecture is a musical interlude on positive and negative structures, designed not only for Visual / Auditory learners, but also as a resource in your lessons: all the examples provided in the video are available as downloads for your lessons.

How do we build questions and answers in the Present Simple, and what signal words do we use... and in what order? This is our final piece of the Present Simple puzzle, from which we begin to plan how we can introduce this to our ESL students.

Every trainer keeps a Toolbox of handy hints and tips which only grow over time - advice from other trainers, useful websites, handy resources and so on. I'm no different and after so many years as an ESL trainer my toolbox is overflowing (despite discarding resources I created early on in my career - cringeworthy now!)

This lecture contains information to add to your personal ESL Trainer Toolbox on teaching the Present Simple. As with all lectures in this course it's designed to ensure you're Classroom Ready.

You may use this material in your lessons, but you must credit me. In other words:

© Copyright. Jacqueline Seidel. 2015. May be used for educational purposes without written permission but with a citation to this source.

This audio recording is our introduction to the sounds of Present continuous. It's aim is to focus your thoughts on this beautiful, "-ing" piece of grammar, and is our first step into making you as familiar with it as you are with... well... with something you're very familiar with!

I encourage you to listen and read the associated transcript, which is available as a downloadable resource.

You may use this material in your lessons, but you must credit me. In other words:

© Copyright. Jacqueline Seidel. 2015. May be used for educational purposes without written permission but with a citation to this source.

We need to understand the ins and outs of the Present Continuous so we're classroom ready, particularly for our ESL students for whom this type of grammar is completely new. So this lecture breaks it down, and starts to give us the language and tools we can use on our classroom.

This lecture is text-based and focuses on:

1. the structure of Present Continuous' questions and negatives,
2. a comparison with Present Simple,
3. frequently asked questions (by students, collected over so many years of teaching)

Without having these basics firmly in our mind, we won't be prepared for our students' questions or problems, and our lessons will be in danger of becoming muddled or difficult for students to follow.

So by the end of this lesson, you'll not only be a professional in Present Continuous, but also in being able to explain and demonstrate it to your students.

Time to update your Toolbox of handy hints and tips!

This lecture contains information to add to your personal ESL Trainer Toolbox on teaching the Present Continuous. As with all lectures in this course it's designed to ensure you're Classroom Ready.

You may use this material in your lessons, but you must credit me. In other words:

© Copyright. Jacqueline Seidel. 2015. May be used for educational purposes without written permission but with a citation to this source.

Listening and reading are all well and good, but you're the ESL teachers and you've got to activate your skills... which is where this lecture some into it.

In this lecture I give you an example of material I used in my early teaching days (an exercise for a group of beginner students) - I'd like you to create similar material for two specific groups.

By the end of this lecture you'll not only have my material to add to your Toolbox, you'll also have had hands-on practice at preparing beginner-level material.

NOTE: Don't forget that while you can use this or any material provided in this course, I encourage you to personalise material where practical. Further, where using specific vocabulary I encourage pre-teaching the vocabulary prior to introducing the exercises. In supporting your students you're giving them the ability to be successful which flows into their motivation.

You may use this material in your lessons, but you must credit me. In other words:

© Copyright. Jacqueline Seidel. 2015. May be used for educational purposes without written permission but with a citation to this source.

This audio recording is our introduction to the sounds of Present Perfect. It's aim is to focus your thoughts on this "perfect" piece of grammar, and is our first step into making you as familiar with it as you are with... well... with something you're very familiar with!

I encourage you to listen and read the associated transcript, which is available as a downloadable resource.

You may use this material in your lessons, but you must credit me. In other words:

© Copyright. Jacqueline Seidel. 2015. May be used for educational purposes without written permission but with a citation to this source.

In my many years of training I've found this particular tense to cause the most problems, because there are a few things at play:

• students need to learn so many irregular verbs, plus the different pronunciation of regular verbs (with an -ed ending)
• this tense may or may not exist in your students' L1
• where this tense does exist in your students' L1, it may be used in a different way or have a different meaning.

It can be difficult to explain, demonstrate or teach this tense and so this section aims to make you familiar with the look and feel of the Present Perfect, and demonstrate effective ways in which it can be introduced and taught to your ESL students.

Every trainer keeps a Toolbox of handy hints and tips which only grow over time - advice from other trainers, useful websites, handy resources and so on. I'm no different and after so many years as an ESL trainer my toolbox is overflowing (despite discarding resources I created early on in my career - cringeworthy now!)

This lecture contains information to add to your personal ESL Trainer Toolbox on teaching the Present Perfect. As with all lectures in this course it's designed to ensure you're Classroom Ready.

You may use this material in your lessons, but you must credit me. In other words:

© Copyright. Jacqueline Seidel. 2015. May be used for educational purposes without written permission but with a citation to this source.

This audio recording is our introduction to the sounds of Past Simple. It's aim is to focus your thoughts on this foundation piece of the past, and is our first step into making you as familiar with it as you are with... well... with something you're very familiar with!

I encourage you to listen and read the associated transcript, which is available as a downloadable resource.

You may use this material in your lessons, but you must credit me. In other words:

© Copyright. Jacqueline Seidel. 2015. May be used for educational purposes without written permission but with a citation to this source.

Before I write anything else, I'd like to flag that this lecture contains photos of my great-grandparents, including a wedding photo taken in around 1910 (my Grandpa was born in 1911). My Udemy students only get the best!

Now, down to the details of this lecture... we encounter the Past Simple tense, look at its components and also signal words. As humans we're naturally pulled to conversations about things which happened in the past, and our ESL students will need this quite early on in their training. As an ESL teacher you need to be absolutely conversant with the ins and outs of this tense, and that's what this lecture sets you up for.

This lecture also contains downloadable material for your Teacher Toolbox.

You may use this material in your lessons, but you must credit me. In other words:

© Copyright. Jacqueline Seidel. 2015. May be used for educational purposes without written permission but with a citation to this source.

In this lecture we hone in on signal words and auxiliary, compare the structure and usage to Present Simple, and provide ample examples of how this tense is formed, how to identify it. This is a natural progression from the previous lectures and leads nicely into Past Continuous.

Building our English Grammar Skeleton is a step-by-step process, so by the end of this lecture you will be more than halfway through the construction of this skeleton. You'll be confident at identifying this tense and ready to start learning teaching techniques.

There are three distinct ways of pronouncing Past Simple regular verbs, and this lecture identifies those three ways as well as the "signal sounds" we can show our students to help them more easily learn the correct pronunciation.

I've found it most effective - in the first instance at least - to be soft on the difference between "t" and "d" endings, concentrating rather on "id" pronunciation endings. If we consider the difference between impeding and non-impeding errors (not in relation to sentence construction or grammar but rather in relation to pronunciation) then I think you'll agree this is a good starting point. After all, a student who says "I live-ed in Berlin" will get more of a giggle (and possible negative marking in an English examination) than one who says - with a hard "t" sound - "I lived(t) in Berlin".

So, by the end of this lecture you'll have the tools you need to see and show the difference in pronunciation for regular verbs.

In this lecture we not only cover why we need the Past Simple, but you have the opportunity to get stuck into some hands-on work creating your own material according to a wee scenario I've included in the lecture.

So, by the end of this lecture you'll have produced some more material for your Teacher's Toolbox, which you'll be immediately able to use!

You may use this material (that given here in the lecture) in your lessons, but you must credit me. In other words:

© Copyright. Jacqueline Seidel. 2015. May be used for educational purposes without written permission but with a citation to this source.

I was thinking, while I was planning this lecture, how to describe the importance of the Past Continuous when an idea came to mind... don't tell, demonstrate! And so I did, in that first sentence.

Just as the Present Continuous can be difficult for our learners, so can the Past Continuous. And sometimes for us also! If we've never actively thought about how we use this little gem, how can we confidently and effectively describe it to our ESL learners?

This lecture seeks to solve this quandary, and it's supported by examples and sets us up for the complementary following lecture.

We can't simple look at Past Continuous in a bubble - it would be like trying to stand on one leg without the support of your foot, ankle or tibia. So in this lecture we examine the differences between the Past Simple and Past Continuous - what are the differences in meaning? Do we need both tenses?

Why, of course we do!

So by the end of this lecture you'll have compared the two tenses and be familiar with the differences. Further, the downloadable section of this lecture will give you idea of how to use this tense in your classroom and activities you can adapt to suit different learner types.

Yes, we're adding more tidbits of information into your Teacher Toolbox. In this lecture we look at what we need to be teaching our ESL students in terms of the past tense, and one specific sample lesson plan of how to introduce one element.

By the end of this lecture you'll have another string in your bow, another element for your toolbox, and have a foundation lesson for teaching Past Simple, - Pronunciation of Regular Verbs.

You may use this material in your lessons, but you must credit me. In other words:

© Copyright. Jacqueline Seidel. 2015. May be used for educational purposes without written permission but with a citation to this source.

Together we've identified present, past and perfect tenses, filled out Teacher Toolbox, and progressively built our English Language Skeleton... but something's missing. Without the future, our skeleton isn't complete. And that's what we look at in this lecture.

Being able to talk about future plans and arrangements is part of our daily dialogue, and our students need this ability. Before we teach them, though, we need to be clear ourselves not only on what the forms are, but how they look, how they're used and from there - how can we teach them.

In this lecture we examine three main future forms: will, going to and present continuous. By the end of this lecture you'll have an understanding not only of these three forms but also potential problems your students may face. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.

This Teacher's Toolbox comes in the shape of a PDF document, which covers not only ideas on how to teach future forms to your students but also provides you with a sample lesson plan.

So by the end of this lecture you've got a lesson plan at your fingertips which you can adapt and expand according to the needs of your students. Go forth and teach!

You may use this material in your lessons, but you must credit me. In other words:

© Copyright. Jacqueline Seidel. 2015. May be used for educational purposes without written permission but with a citation to this source.

Once again, this is a lecture which gives us the opportunity to actively apply the knowledge we've covered thus far. The benefit of this lecture is you'll have more material for your Teacher Toolbox, which you can take directly to your students.

Enjoy!

The fabulous complexities of our English Language Skeleton really come to light in this text-based lecture, which examines two future forms: Future Perfect Simple and Future Perfect Continuous, and then goes on to demonstrate how we can slowly yet surely introduce them to our students. You'll be professionals at understanding and explaining the future tenses at the end of this lecture!

It's time now to take a look back at the topics we've covered so far, and refresh what we've learned. As is good practice, at the end of a lesson we reflect and refresh.

By the end of this lecture that's exactly what we will have done, and you'll be all set for the end of course Quiz!

This is the final lecture in our course, and one in which I have the opportunity to thank you for your participation. I certainly hoped the course met your expectations and I welcome your feedback. Remember, through Udemy you have lifetime access to this course, and I intend that it grows and develops with your input.

Thank you for your participation, and I look forward to hearing from you!

Jacqui.