TEFL Learning Teaching Skills
So you've decided you want to teach English as a foreign language. The following website may be useful as you take your first steps towards booking a course: http://www.englishclub.com/index
To be able to teach English as a foreign language, there are certain skills required that you may or may not already have. The website gives a taste for what is involved in learning teaching skills to enable you to go out and find yourself a job in the TEFL world. To be a good teacher depends partly on the skills you have but also on your personality and your teaching style which you will discover during your course and will learn how to use them to your best advantage in the classroom. You will also need to be able to adapt to the classroom dynamics that you may find yourself in.
Learning teaching skills is not something you do only once, you should always be building on what you already know to improve both your skills and style of teaching. Teaching should always be interesting and fun for the learners and it is your responsibility to make a creative positive learning environment for your students. A website which provides a lot of useful information to help you both with your study programme and your future career as a TEFL teacher is http://www.onestopenglish.com This website has many useful tips, lesson plans, grammar tips etc to help you make the lessons interesting.
A trainee TEFL teacher will have shown their ability in listening, speaking, reading and writing English in the observed teaching practices. These areas need to be finely tuned in order to make the best use of class time and for student learning. The requirement to understand and use the phonetic alphabet is also a necessity to enable the teacher to help students with any pronunciation problems they may be experiencing, perhaps because they do not have certain ?sounds? within their native language. The trainee teacher will learn how these sounds are used as well as using mouth diagrams and other useful tools which can be used in the classroom.
To assist you in having a successful lesson, planning is essential. There is a lot to be learnt in lesson planning. Planning is a thinking skill, it requires both time and effort to make it a success. Firstly, you need to ensure you know what it is you are going to teach in that particular lesson, which grammar point and/or vocabulary point. Work out what you intend to achieve by the end of the lesson and work out what you are going to do to meet your aim.
There is nothing too difficult in learning teaching skills but it does help if you have the right attitude and a passion for helping others learn a new language which could help improve their own lives. It is an ongoing process that should continue throughout your career, as a teacher you will always be both teaching and learning inside and outside the classroom
Author: Julie Earp
Date of post: 2006-10-10
