Information Gap Activity

  Once we're satisfied that all the students have been engaged and that they've been given the opportunity to say something, we can move on to our study phase. Here, it may be necessary or useful to actually pre-teach some gaps in knowledge that have been shown from the engage phase and those gaps in knowledge may include actual grammar structures or indeed useful vocabulary and it's very important that, before we move on to doing any forms of activity, we check their understanding of this material. So, we need to do some study exercises. It's also very useful if you leave this information up on the board through all that study period. Those study activities can just be the normal types of gap fills or matching activities and, as always, we need to demonstrate those activities,...  [Read more]

  This video is part of our ESA Methodology series. The ESA methodology consists of three stages. In this series, we look at the individual purposes of each stage and typical activities for each stage. This second video introduces the study phase of ESA. The purpose of this phase is to cover the actual teaching of the lesson and to check the understanding of that material.The second stage or phase of the lesson is known as the study phase and really the purpose of this phase is to cover the actual teaching of the lesson and to check understanding of that material. Typically in an ESA lesson, the study phase will have two parts. The first phase of the study is to cover the actual teaching component in what's known as the board work and what we try to do in the board work phase is to...  [Read more]

  A final example is going to be an example of a patchwork ESA lesson and remember we said the form of this particular lesson will start with and engage always and will finish with and activate and there'll be some variation of E, S and A within the brackets here. So we're going to generate our patchwork ESA lesson as follows. Starting with the engage, the students are going to look at holiday photos and talk about what they like and don't like from what they see. From that, we're going to move directly into an activate phase and what the students are going to do is to make comments about holiday brochures and try to act out a role-play between the travel agent and a customer. Again, as this is taking place, the teacher will be moving around and looking for gaps in knowledge in...  [Read more]

  So, having elicited this particular structure, what I'm now able to do is to move on to the actual study activities. Typically, they will be in the form of worksheets to check that the students actually understand this information. So, I might prepare three activities. They may not do them all but, for example, I could prepare these three study activities. So, the first one is going to be a fairly straightforward matching activity, where perhaps they match the subject to its correct verb "to be" in that part of the sentence. The second one is going to be a gap fill. For example, I might use this verb here and ask them to complete a sentence using that verb, so that I can check that any spelling changes that take place are correct and the final one is going to be an unscramble,...  [Read more]

  Now an example of a straight arrow ESA lesson for our engage phase. What we're going to do is to show the students a video of animals and they are going to say what they like about those animals and try to create a list of some more. So, remember what we're trying to do here is to get the students talking and thinking in English. We're using a typical engage activity, which is to create a list and we try to make sure that all the students have been involved in some way in creating those lists. Moving on to the study phase, the first part is going to be the board work and the teacher is going to try to elicit from the students what each of those animals can and can't do. Typically, what the students will say is just single words, so "run," "jump," "fly," etc. What we would then...  [Read more]

  This video is a review of the conditionals in the English language. We take a look at the zero conditional, first conditional, second conditional, third conditional and mixed conditional. This video is specifically aimed at teaching the conditionals in an ESL setting. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. Productive skills are very important from a writing and speaking perspectives, having a communicative purpose while matching accuuracy and...  [Read more]

What does TEFL mean?    The acronym TEFL stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language. It is commonly used to refer to training courses that almost anyone can take to learn the skills and knowledge required to teach English to non-native speakers in countries all over the world. What is the difference between TESOL and TEFL?    TEFL stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language and TESOL stands for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. These descriptions are generally used interchangeably, however, TESOL is more common in the USA and TEFL is more common in the UK. Do I need a TEFL certificate to teach abroad?    Although it is possible to teach abroad without a TEFL certificate, we recommended that you complete a TEFL...  [Read more]