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| Found pic @The Blaze Blog |
Another gripping article by Claudia Pesce for BusyTeacher.org: "No ESL teacher is perfect, no matter if you’ve been teaching for 20 minutes or 20 years... Anyone can make mistakes, most of which are results of our trying too hard or being too impatient.
You complete their sentences for them. Your student says, 'Playing soccer is…' And you jump in and say, 'fun?' Talk about eager beavers!... Sometimes the teacher is the eager beaver in class and doesn’t give students enough time to come up with the right word or answer. Students need time. If you jump the gun and complete the answer for them, you’re taking away their opportunity to prove to you just how much they’ve learned. Also, consider that it could actually annoy the student. What if, in the situation above, the word the student was actually looking for is 'boring'? Completing students’ sentences is like cutting someone else’s food. You do it when they’re little, but at some point they have to start doing it for themselves. You ask them if they understand. Imagine I am looking straight into your eyes, and I ask you 'Do you understand?' Most students will feel compelled to squeak out a tentative 'yes…' Who would actually face the teacher and say 'no'? Who wants the rest of class to think that they are not the brightest bulb in the box? Don’t put your students in this position. There are ways to check for comprehension without having to put students on the spot. Try asking them questions, instead, to make sure they’ve understood. You echo their answers. A student says, 'I work at Google.' You say, 'You work at Google. Great! You work at Google.' First of all, there is absolutely no learning value in parroting your students. Second, if you do it immediately after they speak, you may be interrupting their train of thought and may even cut them off from whatever else they were going to say. What if your student was about to tell you what he did at Google? After a student speaks, give him or her time to add something else. If you feel compelled to say something, simply reply with a 'How interesting!' And pause to give them time to add a new piece of information. You don’t check to see if they’ve understood your instructions. So, you rattle off a set of instructions in rapid-fire succession and say, 'OK, let’s get started!' This is usually when students start whispering to each other things like, 'What did she say?' or 'What do we do now?' Always check to see if they’ve gotten your instructions straight. Ask the class, 'OK class so what do we do first? And then? Good! You may begin.' If it’s an exercise they must complete, it’s a great idea to do the first question with them as an example.'
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