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What is the best thing I’ve learned from this course? Before I answer this question, I need to say that I have always wanted to take a TESOL certificate course. That desire I could say, it is probably since I was studying to get my degree in teaching English as a foreign language, I used to tell myself that one day I was going to do it and here I am. Why? I do not know. Maybe because I believe that as an educator I have to keep improving my language teaching practice in order to share or transmit that knowledge to the students. And now that I have come to the end of the first step, I have asked myself not only what I have learned but also if it was worth taking this course. My answer is definitely yes! I have learned a lot. I have reviewed some old forgotten aspects about teaching English but I have also learned something new as the “Engage, Study and Activate” best known as the “ESA” method and it was created by Jeremy Hammer. This method covered all of the traditional English teaching methods such as the grammar-translation, audio-lingual, presentation, practice, and production method, task-based learning among others. Each one of the three elements of this method has the objective to motivated and get the learners to involve in the process of learning English. Previous to get the students to engage there is a process of elicitation (asking thought-provoking questions). What is good about elicitation is that as a teacher we find out what students know about the topic and prepare them to refresh and improve their previous knowledge and to learn more. Elicitation also gives learners the opportunity to use the target language as well. The engage phase of the ESA methodology is where teacher provokes learners interests in the target language. The objective of the engage phase is to get the learners to involve in their learning process as much as they can. It is a starter or warmer where the whole purpose is to get the learners thinking and speaking in English as much as they could before the next step of the lesson. Moreover, the study is the second phase of the ESA methodology, the aim of this phase is to where teachers get the students to involve and focus on the new topic or lesson and how it works grammatically, semantically and phonetically. Here the learners may work in pairs, groups in other to construct the language. Finally, the Activate is the last stage of the ESA methodology, in this stage, the learners should be able and are encouraged to use and apply all they know about the target language. In this phase students freely practice, work in pairs or groups, prepare dialogs, play games, debates, write or tell stories using the target language. In conclusion, I considered ESA methodology a great and innovative technique to teach English because it takes into account the students’ needs to learn a new language by providing them not only a great phase to learn the language but also opportunities to use it and provide long-lasting learning.
