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The course has been very enlightening on the whole. Some of the units, such as on classroom management, were very much in the social science arena, and these modules helped me to think more profoundly than I might otherwise have done on providing a psycho-social environment which is conducive to efficient and effective learning. For example, the ideas expounded in the course materials about how delinquent student behaviour might be instigated by how the teacher manages key factors which effect classroom dynamics such as seating arrangement and lesson format, have certainly shown me how I need to be sensitive to such issues when organising my lessons. How I will put into action this knowledge will largely depend on a number of other factors such as the type of activity my class is undertaking, the number of students within the class and how well or badly certain students interact with each other socially. The other major thing I gained from this course was the grammatical system behind the english language. While I knew how to produce grammatically correct english on whole, I had never really dissected the system behind it, or at least I had forgotten most of it. If I had not learnt these aspects of the english language again, it is certain that I would have had great difficulty explaining to students why certain things in english should be written or spoken in a particular way which would most likely have compromised my credibility as an authority on english. In future it is certain that further revision of these and other grammatical points will be required if I am to teach english effectively, and this is certainly something I will pursue after the course, both by reviewing the course reading materials and other books I have on english grammar. This course has also helped me greatly with producing effective lesson planning. Before the course I was uncertain about how to approach teaching english to speakers of foreign languages, in terms of what methodology should be used. I can see the wisdom in the ESA approach as it attempts to get students attention before taking them through the difficult points of english which need to be learnt. I am also quite keen on the blank lesson plan template provided in the course as it helps the teacher to focus on key aspects I may have otherwise overlooked during my early career as a teacher. Certainly, during my future career I will make use of this blank lesson template when planning lessons in order to help keep me organised and professional in my approach to teaching. Finally, I also found the course on pronunciation and phonology very interesting. This is because it made me appreciate aspects of how we communicate with each other in english which I might otherwise have overlooked, such as how english speakers change intonation when asking a question. Non-native speakers are unlikely to be aware of these facets of english language communication and so it is critical that the teacher has firm grasp of how to explain such language points to students, which I certainly feel I now have. When teaching such language points in future, I am likely to make thorough use of some of the teaching aids elicited in this unit, such as the mouth diagrams, intonation arrows and phonemic alphabet to help students with these aspects of english.
