Teach English in Jiuzihe Zhen - Huanggang Shi

In the TESOL classroom more student talk time means more opportunity to practice and improve speaking the language. This is the whole game for us as language educators. Ensuring the increase of student talk time (STT) is absolutely essential! So how to decrease teacher speaking time is equally of the utmost importance! It is also of specific importance for me personally because of my extroversion and external processing I am mindful of my need to consider a possible tendency for too much teacher talk time (TTT). To ensure the most effective & beneficial teaching practice I can, I intend to inform and equip myself on how to reduce excess TTT and instead ensure an abundance of STT. How do we as English language educators ensure a decrease in our teacher talk time? We can look at core foundations of teaching philosophy, practices in teaching that provide the necessary tools or building blocks for students to be successful in producing language, and practical techniques and methods that increase STT. We know that a student with qualities ripe for learning is one who feels safe and little to no stress, they feel empowered to participate, experiment with the language, and are willing to take risks and make mistakes. We know this is essential for effective language learning as is a learning environment where students are encouraged to discover the language for themselves rather than being told by a teacher- Less “teacher telling” and more “student discovery”. We can therefore first look at some important core foundations of ones teaching philosophy. A teaching philosophy that decreases TTT would work to create an environment for students where anxiety and stress are extremely low. It would build into the classroom safety to speak, experiment, and make mistakes. This can be built by creating rapport between students and the teacher and students. Teachers can learn names, get to know their students, build group rapport through fun activities and experiences, make the environment welcoming and enjoyable, construct lessons and activities that are fun. The teacher can be friendly, positive, and encouraging making sure not to put students on the spot, or over correct. A Teacher can ensure safety for students in the classroom with rules for how students are to treat each other respectfully. They can also create an environment where students get to discover the language rather than being told it. This is accomplished by generous application of the Elicitation method. By asking thought provoking questions or using other forms such as realia, gestures, or pictures, teachers can entice students to the discovery of language themselves. The combination of a stress free environment and learning by self discovery results in more student participation which results in more student talk time (STT). Upon this solid foundation we then add the responsibility of teachers to equip students properly in lessons to set them up for success. This means not expecting they produce language out of thin air and being surprised when they are quiet and timid and unable to produce. This is the practice of doing your job as a teacher to set students up for success from the outset. Ways to provide the necessary tools for the success of your students include: providing language, vocabulary, and forms needed to produce the writing and speaking activities you are expecting. When new forms and vocabulary are presented and modeled in and ‘I do, we do, then you do’ pattern students are able to succeed and produce what you are asking them because you have provided the building blocks they need to be successful and feel accomplished. This then in turn motivates and encourages them to participate more, continue to take risks, experiment and be willing to speak in English even if it means they make mistakes. Practically this can be giving students time to prepare before they are speaking in front of the class. Giving students worksheets/dialogues that than can prepare on their own/in pairs will yield the confidence and preparation students need to successfully speak in front of the whole class without stress. A teacher can also use DEGO (demonstrate, elicit, & give out method) to ensure students are prepared for producing the language necessary for speaking activities. Some practical techniques and specific methods that can be employed include: Elicitation which is so simple but highly effective. Elicitation gets students to give you the answers and essentially to discover the learning instead of being told by the teacher. Instead of a teacher lecturing new information a teacher asks questions that lead to the target language and the students produce answers with what they already know or that lead to reaching the target language. Specific forms of elicitation that can be employed include: Realia, pictures, photos, videos, memes, gestures, and audio coupled with elicitation, questions, gap fill sentence forms, word association, lists of vocab, etc. Other forms of increasing STT include: Pair-work, group-work, group mingle/surveys, games, roleplays, Ice breakers, warm ups, presentations, repetition, & choral drilling. In all of these methods you ensure student talk time to be 50%-100% of the time. Any time a student repeats a teacher or responds to elicitation you are at 50/50 ratios of TTT/STT. Any time students work in pairs or small groups you reach 100% STT. These are all great methods to consistently include in your teaching to ensure that it is always at a minimum of 50/50 ratios of TTT/STT or more. The teacher and student that find themselves in the classroom that employs these three: core foundations of teaching philosophy, practices in teaching that provide the necessary tools for students to be successful in producing language, and the practical techniques and methods mentioned above will find themselves in a better, happier, more effective classroom. This is a classroom where students are speaking and discovering their own learning, and teachers are speaking less but teaching more! I look forward to implementing this research into my own teaching practice to make me a better teacher.