Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Haolaihure Sumu? Are you interested in teaching English in Chifeng Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
Teacher attitude, course curriculum, and experience are central to providing successful teaching. However, short attention span, whether because of younger learners, older students obligated to take a course, or even a bad teaching environment can challenge even those with plenty of experience. Children’s attention span is notoriously short even when they want to pay attention. When they are uninterested, they will fidget, play or look at anything around them except the task at hand. Some child development experts claim that children should be able to focus for 2-5 minutes times their age. For a six-year old, this would be 12-30 minutes. Particularly after a weekend and even more after a summer break, young learners are out of habitually receiving hands-on instruction. The Engage stage of the class can involve writing one’s name or other words using Legos, silly putty, or Play-Doh. They can write words using color markers or crayons and then cut them out and rearrange them in a collage using glue or transparent tape. Physical activities work well to break up the tension from sitting stationary for a long time. Kids can take a ten minute break to do jumping jacks, or even go around having one student give a word to another student. That student would do as many jumping jacks as there are letters in the word. If the first student mispronounces the word, they get to do jumping jacks. Lastly, just having everyone get up and walk around in the classroom can also break the monotony. Completing more difficult learning tasks can be improved by breaking up the exercise into smaller components. For example, when teaching teaching irregular verbs, the teacher can start out by introducing the more easily classifiable verb types one at a time, for example build - built - built, hurt - hurt - hurt, etc. Classroom decor directly competes for the student’s attention span. Open windows towards a busy street make it harder for some students to focus on the teacher. Class activity-related posters will keep the students in a mood to study, but movie posters, mirrors, and anything moving will greatly lower students’ attention spans. Students of all ages as well as most tasks benefit when made into a game. For example, when teaching comparative adverbs, students can form groups. Representatives from each group can come to the blackboard to form comparative adverbs from the base form, and the rest of the team can help. The winning team wins a prize. The teacher can grab the students’ attention as soon as the students enter the class. One way is to start asking questions related to the day’s topic. “Did you have a big dinner yesterday?” “How is your pet dog?” “Who liked the main character in yesterday’s movie?” These can all be used as a jumping board for a lesson into adjectives. Another way is to ask students what they learned in the last class. What were the verbs that they went over, where was the fictional character ‘Bil’ going on vacation, what prepositional phrases do they remember. The class can start with a quick and painless short writing exercise. This can simply be a written response to what they learned in the last class, or a quick response to a prompt: write two adjectives, both starting with the same letter, and write out their comparative and superlative forms. Improving attention spans is an useful teaching skill, and it helps to improve recall and retention by making connections between the taught material and the students’ other interests and priorities. At the same time, it helps to break up the monotony that can often settle in in a study environment.
