#TEFL Tips View full tips at: http://bit.ly/djmWSr

The TESOL certification blog: Hypnotherapy Stress Helpful Hints & TEFL Tips: Part Three TEFL Tips 1. keep a notebook designated specifically for analyzing your classes or classes of your counterparts. when you’re not teaching, write down an evaluation, & be sure create a way of dating the pages to keep them organized. (I’m quite partial to using markers to highlight main teaching points, using a different color for different classes or different days, depending.) With your own classes, take time during the school day to write down new ideas that come to you, or ways to rectify whatever problems arose that day. It’s a great way to reflect & find creative solutions. 2. Assigning English names (especially to younger or smaller classes) can be a fun activity. one of my friends who is teaching English in China suggested writing down names of pieces of paper, & having students pulling them out of a bag. Taking that a step further, I wrote down female names on one color of paper, & male names on another color of paper. I chose names of close friends & family members to make the activity fun for myself. The girls are instructed to pull out one color (in my case, pink) & boys another color (in my case, yellow). a good homework assignment, especially for younger students, is for them to design & color their own nametags & bring them to class. (It’s a good idea to keep the nametags afterwards though, & lay them out at the start of each class for students to take. Otherwise some tags will invariably get lost.) 3. Class points taken one step further: The same friend teaching in China described to me a system he has for his classes using a big map hung in the classroom. he suggested making little pirate ships, & writing each class name upon the ships. The ships are trying to get to a destination, & each class time, the ship either moves forward or backward depending on whether the class was cooperative that day or not. if you have enough of the foreign language to explain, you can make up fun reasons why the ship moved forward or backward. (For example, on a good day you have “Smooth sailing!” whereas on a bad day, “Your first mate got sick & the expedition got thrown off course!”) This can be just as engaging for students as it is for teachers. & it doesn’t have to be ships. Cars, camels, bumblebees, you name it. 4. Minute Marks: Oh, China-teaching friend, you’re full of ideas. (His name is Andrew, by the way.) he has his students on a system where if they misbehave, he adds a small chalk tick-mark to the upper right-hand corner of his chalkboard. The students know that each mark represents an extra thirty seconds they’ll have to stay after class & do absolutely nothing (no talking, no homework, no reading, nothing). he has this system working so well that sometimes all he has to do is grab a piece of chalk & move in the direction of the right-hand side of the chalkboard to get his students to behave! 5. a “Conversation Check”can help you assess where your students are in their conversational skills. I wrote up little five-question interviews, & then took individual students out into the hallway during class when they were working on an assignment & asked the questions to them. This “Conversation Check” helped me to gauge where my students in that grade were at, & provided me with information about basic conversational vocabulary that my students lack. I suggest making a long list of questions separated into categories (greetings, basic information [name, age, etcetera], favorites [hobbies, sports, seasons, films, singers, etcetera], past tense questions, family-related questions [How many brothers & sisters do you have? Combine with job-related questions to see if they know professions! Where does your father work?] hypotheticals [What language do you wish you could speak? What country would you like to visit? if you had a million tugriks, etcetera], & anything else you feel necessary). By having lots of questions in these categories, you can pick & choose the questions when you’re asking the students. we all know that the students will go tell each other what questions were asked, so this keeps them on their toes. after your “Conversation Check,” journal in your classroom notebook about what the students’ strengths & weaknesses were. now you know what to work on! (A last note: be incredibly open & friendly during the conversations. Students are probably nervous, even though “Conversation Checks” shouldn’t be graded. Just keep telling them that they’re doing a great job. This is crucial!) What can I say? I’m a Sociologist at heart (enough to capitalize the S, friends). 6. Five-Minute English Slang crash courses are a great way to kill that dead zone at the end of class. I’ve taught my students things that native speakers are known to say. those lazy tongue concoctions (gonna, gotta, hafta, wanna, kinda, etcetera) are only too-common in our spoken language. & what about greetings like “Hey” & terms like “guys” (for a group of people, male or female) & “cool”? Teach away! I’ve abstained from teaching the outdated “groovy,” even though I say it constantly. 7. Me talk pretty one day. As native English speakers, we should know the little nuances of our language. English can be tricky, so I’ll spell things out in black & white. your is possessive (“Your car is groovy.”), while you’re is a contraction of you & are (“You’re so awesome.”). There refers to a location (“Put it over there.”), their is possessive (“Their camels look well-watered.”), & they’re is a contraction of they & are (“They’re givin’ me the heebie jeebies!”). 8. if you have access to a CD player (or if you’re willing to bring your laptop to school with you), consider playing music at the beginning & end of class. it can be both a soothing & energizing way to greet & bid farewell to your students. it can also be an uplifting way to start each class, for both the students & teachers alike. Playing music in English (of course) can also tie into the entire TEFL philosophy by providing spoken (sung) English as well as a bit of Western culture simultaneously. Article source: http://hypnotherapystress.net/helpful-hints-tefl-tips-part-three