Teach English in XiaojiAcun Zhen - Yongzhou Shi

As a teacher our role is to be the leader in the classroom, however, this does not mean that we should be speaking in front of the class the entirety of the class time. As the native speaking teacher, it is important for the students to hear our voices and hear our accents but what is equally important is that the students are all engaged in the lesson and that they all are practicing themselves. If a teacher speaks 90% of the time and students just sit back and listen then they will lose focus, not practice themselves, and the teacher will tire out. That is why I will propose two ways we can decrease teacher speaking time. One simple thing that almost all teachers do in all classes in that they take attendance. Attendance presents an opportunity for teachers not only for them to create positive routines, hold the students accountable, and decrease teacher speaking but also a time for them to sit back and let their class run itself. Traditionally, as many of us have experienced, for about two or three minutes a teacher will call out the individual names of all the students to check for attendance. Here, it’s 100% the teacher speaking with a one-word response from the students. One at a time the students respond, and the others listen. However, if you group the students ahead of time and select a daily “Captain” of each group you can check in with just three or four students for attendance who will then state, in full sentences, whether their group is present or whether there is someone who is absent. This initially will require more work from the teacher as they must create the groups and they must also create an attendance list where they can rotate the daily captain, the teacher must also teach the vocabulary and the phrasing for the attendance routine, but once that is all done every class starts with the students running it themselves. They can speak in English and communicate with the teacher, so though not everyone in the class will speak, a smaller number will speak a lot more and the teacher a lot less. It also is just a great routine to start the class with every day. Another way to decrease teacher speaking time is to have the students do information fillers. Instead of having just one sheet distributed to all the class and then going over it if the teacher hands out information filler sheets and goes over how to do them he can then do a few examples on the board in front of the class so that they know how to do it and then he can let them start and finish on their own. When the students stand up and walk around, they are engaged and they are speaking, listening, reading, and writing all at the same time. Though, it is with non-native speakers, it is fine because the teacher already gave the example to start and they also will go over the worksheet at the end so that they can hear yet again how the questions and the responses will be properly phrased. This creates an opportunity for the students to speak a lot more and for the teacher to sit back and observe how the class is advancing. Teachers will have days that they do speak a lot. Some lessons do require a lot of teacher speaking time; however, the norm should be to avoid it as much as possible! Teachers should understand that the students want to speak and to engage with others. By standing up front and lecturing students we put them to sleep. And again, in the study part of the lesson, that is necessary, but teachers should be ready to engage the students with engaging activities so that it is not the teacher show but rather a lesson that revolves around the student’s participation and speaking.