TEACHING TIPS

TEFL.NET/EnglishClub.com Copyright Liz Regan 2000


Teaching Tip 1: Pairwork/Groupwork

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How:
1. Make a list of pairs of names before the lesson starts or while the students are coming in or just
tell them when the time comes ‘Gianni, you work with Paola; Chiara, you’re with Stefano this time.
2. If there is an odd number of students make a group of three but break them up later in the lesson
and put them into pairs with someone else so they get more chance to speak.
3. You could put them in small groups to start with if the activity allows. You could even make the
activity a competition in small teams if the activity allows, seeing which team gets the most
answers right. Use the board or a piece of paper for keeping score.
4. Change the partners quite often so that the students don’t get bored with their partner. This is
especially important if there is a student who isn’t very popular with the others.
Why:
1. It’s good for the students to speak to each other in English (see TT5 for further explanation).
2. It’s good for the students to work with another student sometimes rather than alone (see TT5 and
TT13) for further explanation).
Extra Info:
I don’t put my students into groups bigger than 3 because I don’t think they get enough chance to
speak in such a large group so they switch off, start fidgeting, get frustrated, let the hard-working
students do all the work, fall asleep etc. In a pair, one student is speaking and one is listening and
formulating a response, in a group of three, one is speaking, and usually the other two are
listening and formulating responses, in a group of four (or more), one is speaking, one or two are
listening and formulating responses and the other one is asleep, aware that s/he hasn’t got much
chance of getting a word in edge-ways. Or of course, in a group of four, two speak to each other
while the other two often either fall asleep or end up speaking to each other too, in which case
you might as well have put them in pairs in the first place.
If you have an odd number of students don’t pair the extra student up with yourself - make a
group of three somewhere. I used to take on the ‘odd’ student myself when I started in EFL but
I found that it didn’t work. The other students weren’t daft - they realised they were missing out
on the teacher’s attention and I realised they were right - I was short-changing them by not
monitoring them as I should.
If you’ve got some talkative and some quiet students, pair the quiet ones together for the fluency
activities (as opposed to the vocabulary/grammar activities) to encourage them to talk more. I
used to put one talkative student in a pair with a quiet one, thinking that the quiet one would speak
more if his/her partner was the chatty type. I was wrong - the talkative one monopolises the
conversation and the quiet one is happy to let this happen.
NB If you only have one student, simply ‘pair up’ with your student. The
worksheets are designed to be used in individual lessons as well as group
ones.
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Teaching Tip 2: Reading Aloud

How:
1. Pick a student and ask him/her to read the instructions for Activity 1/2/3 or whatever.
‘Marco, please read the instructions for Activity 2 for us’.
2. Pick a different student each time.
Why:
1. It saves you doing it.
2. You can check pronunciation.
3. The other students may well understand the instructions better when read by another student.
4. The students are more likely to listen to another student than to you.
5. If they all read the instructions silently they will all finish at different times. If they listen to someone
reading the instructions out loud they all finish at the same time.
Extra Info:
Getting students to read aloud used to be unpopular because the powers that be said that it was
unrealistic as we never do it in real life - you read books silently, don’t you? Things have changed
since then as it has since been argued that we do do it, e.g. ‘hey, listen to this, it says in the paper
here that Prince Charles is already, secretly, married to Camilla! Listen - “Prince Charles allegedly
married Camilla Parker Bowles in a secret ceremony at Windsor Castle yesterday. The
ceremony was attended only by the prince’s closest family and friends. A palace spokesman
denied the rumour, saying that..............” etc.

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Teaching Tip 3: Checking Understanding


How:
1. Ask your students ‘Is that clear?’.
2. If it’s clear, fine. If anyone says ‘No, can you explain that?/ Can you explain again?’, don’t. Ask
if one of the other students can explain it.
3. If nobody understands it, go through an example step by step together. They should get it then.
4. If they still don’t get it, go through another example together.
5. If the poor things are still lost either 1) Do the whole activity together as a class, if possible or
2) Give up and go to the next activity.
3) If it’ s a word they are having difficulty understanding,
you could set it for homework and get the students to
explain the meaning to you next lesson.
6. Another way to check understanding of instructions is to ask the students to imagine that you are
a new student who has just come in - can they explain how to do the activity?
7. Another way to check understanding, not only of instructions, is by concept checking (see TT19).
Why:
1. You need to check that the students have understood because they are unlikely to tell you if
they haven’t - they will simply bumble through the exercise, doing it wrong, probably aware
that they are doing it wrong, and losing confidence.
2. You need to ask ‘Is that clear?’ rather than ‘Do you understand?’ because the chances of a
student saying ‘No, I don’t understand’ are very slim - they will feel very stupid. Would you
admit to not understanding something in front of others in a classroom situation? I wouldn’t!
The student who doesn’t understand will be convinced s/he is the only one who doesn’t get it
and will not want to admit that in public. Questions like ‘Is that clear?’ shift the blame to the
quality of the instructions instead. Neutral ground - much nicer.
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Teaching Tip 4: Pronunciation


How:
1. Model the word yourself. (This means you say it in a normal way to the students). Then get the
students to repeat it after you, all together like in a chorus until they get it nearly right.
Don’t worry if they aren’t perfect. Who is?
2. Then model the word again and ask individual students to repeat the word after you.
3. You could put the word on the board and ask the students how many syllables it has and then
practise some stress placement. Ask them which is the stressed (strong) syllable. For example:
before = 2 syllables be FORE = The second syllable is stressed.
after = 2 syllables AF ter = The first syllable is stressed.
computer = 3 syllables com PU ter = The second syllable is stressed.
afternoon = 3 syllables af ter NOON = The third syllable is stressed.
If you know the phonetic alphabet you could write the words in that too.
Why:
1. It helps the students to improve their pronunciation which is very important because there’s very
little point learning a new word, learning what it means and how to use it in a sentence, if no one
understands them when they say it because their pronunciation is so bad.
2. Doing a little pronunciation work can fill time here and there in a lesson. It’s especially useful as a
filler (a quickie activity to fill those few minutes at the end of a lesson when you’ve run out of
material but it’s a little too early to let the students go).
Extra info:
If you’re planning to do some syllable work or stress placement or use the phonetic
alphabet it’s a good idea to write the words, syllables, stress and phonetic spelling down
before the lesson because, I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to do it spontaneously
during the lesson! For some reason I get muddled and write the stress on the wrong syllable etc.
If you want to do some stress placement work but you don’t know which syllable is stressed,
look in a dictionary, especially one for students - it will have the stress indicated, usually by an
apostrophe thingy. The syllable after the apostrophe thingy is the stressed one, usually.
For example:
be’fore ‘after com’puter after’noon
If you look in the first few pages of the dictionary it will explain how it indicates stress placement.
Not all dictionaries indicate it in the same way. (For more information about dictionaries in general
see TT20).
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Teaching Tip 5: Speaking to Other Students in English



How:
1. Put the students into pairs or small groups (See TT1 for further explanation).
Why:
1. Making students speak to each other instead of the teacher maximises STT (Student Talking
Time) and minimises TTT (Teacher Talking Time). This is a good thing because the students
are the ones who need to practise their English - you, hopefully, don’t!

2. A lot of students will be using their English to speak to non-mother tongue speakers anyway so
they might as well start getting used to it. For example, my students are Italian and they often
need English to speak to other European clients and colleagues. Some of them never use
English to speak to mother-tongue English speakers at all!

Extra info:
Students like talking to the teacher because it makes them feel important and that they are getting
value for money. While this is fine in a one-to-one lesson it is no good in a group because while one
student is monopolising the teacher/conversation everyone else is losing out.
When I encounter students who want to talk to me all the time in a lesson (flattering though it is) I
advise them (politely) to consider having individual lessons if they want the teacher’s full attention all
the time. If that doesn’t work I explain like this:
60 minutes divided by 6 students = 10 minutes each; so they can each talk to me for 10
minutes and I will listen to each of them for 10 minutes which is sad really when they’ve paid for
a 60 minute lesson. And, let’s face it, it wouldn’t really be 10 minutes because you have to take
time off for taking the register at the beginning of the lesson, giving everyone time to hang their
coats up, sit down, get settled, receive their worksheets, read the instructions, listen to the
teacher presenting grammar points or whatever, do a listening exercise or a roleplay, go
through homework together, receive more homework, get ready to leave etc. 5 minutes would
be more realistic. So there you have it, pay for 60 minutes and get 5. Where’s the logic?
If that doesn’t work I do this:
Let the student have his/her way. Yup! Smile and listen very attentively. Make sure that
everyone else is listening too. Let him/her start rambling, taking up everyone’s valuable time
and then just pick him/her up on every grammar mistake and correct his/her pronunciation every
second word. I find that the student in question usually enjoys this to start with, getting so much
attention - having a one-to-one lesson in front of everybody - but the novelty soon wears off. I
either correct the student aloud, frequently, or write his/her errors up on the board as s/he goes
along (‘don’t mind me, do keep going, we can all learn so much from your mistakes’).
Generally speaking, correcting a student every few seconds destroys the impact of whatever s/he
was saying and makes them (and everyone else) lose the thread. Writing their mistakes up publicly
on the board tends to make students shrivel up and die (See TT11 for an explanation about how to
do error correction nicely). After this, in my experience, the student is generally quite happy to get
on with pairwork. And so are all the other students! Sometimes I have students who don’t want to
speak much until they can be sure of getting it right and not making mistakes because mistakes are
bad things, right? (Wrong! See TT11 for further explanation). These students tell me that they want
me to talk to them (individually) because they will learn correct English through listening to me. (By
osmosis, presumably!) They can’t see the benefit of talking to each other because if they make a
mistake the other student won’t be able to correct them. (Actually, the other student often can correct
them, and does correct them and that’s what they don’t like!)
In such cases I explain like this: Learning English is like learning to play the piano/to drive/to swim etc.
When you want to learn to play the piano/drive/swim is it enough just sit and watch other people
doing it or do you need to have a go yourself and make mistakes and practise a lot until you get it
right? Speaking together gives you that chance to have a go yourself and the time to practice.
Or like this: If you honestly think that you will learn correct English by listening to a mother-tongue
speaker speaking correct English, why don’t you just rent an English video? It’s a lot cheaper than
paying lesson prices to listen to me.
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Teaching Tip 6: Guessing Answers


How:

1. When there is a list of possible answers, encourage students to guess the answers (by saying
things like ‘There are two words to choose from and only one gap to fill so you’ve got a 50%
chance of being right!)

2. Encourage students to look at the words before and the words after the gap (in a gap-fill -
a.k.a. cloze - exercise) to help them decide what type of word is needed in the gap. Will the
answer be a verb? an adjective? a noun? In most exercises this will limit their choice of answers
and therefore increase their chances of guessing the right one (see the previous point I made).


3. If they are still looking a bit blank it’s probably because they are suffering from ‘gap-fill tunnel
vision’ which means that this is what they see:
Irrelevant gobbledegook an __________ with I needn’t read this because it comes after the gap.
Would you know what to write in the space? I wouldn’t!


4. Encourage them to try to guess the meaning from the context (i.e. the sentence or paragraph the
gap is in).
Lets look at the same example again, this time with the context:
It rained yesterday when I was out but I hadn’t got an ___________ with me so I got wet.
In this example the context tells us that the missing word is probably going to be ‘umbrella’.


5. This technique also works well when there is a word which the students don’t know in a sentence.
If they have never seen the word ‘umbrella’ before and it is in the sentence then the sentence
will look something like this to the student:
Irrelevant gobbledegook an umbskjdhfskjflla with I needn’t read this because it comes after the gap.
Some students will panic at this point and ask you what an umbskjdhfskjflla is. You don’t need to
spoonfeed them the answer. If the students use the context to help them they will probably be
able to work out the meaning for themselves (see point 4 above) and thus gain confidence as
learners.

Why:
1. The students know a lot more than they think they know - the posh term for this is ‘passive
knowledge’. This basically means that somewhere in the past they have seen or heard this word
or phrase but they don’t remember it consciously. (They don’t know they know - they think they
don’t know, but you know better, you think they know - confused yet?) Anyway, if you can get
them to make a guess, the chances are that they will get it right quite a lot of the time. If you put
the students into pairs or small groups the chances are that with their combined passive
knowledge they’ll get most of the answers right, though they won’t know how they did it. They’ll
probably think it’s just luck. It isn’t.
Of course, the upshot of all this is that they get most of it right and consequently feel very good.
Their confidence is raised and that is half the battle with speaking a foreign language.

2. In real life (outside the classroom) the students will be put in situations where they don’t know all
the answers or they don’t know all the words etc. If they have developed the confidence to
trust themselves to make an educated guess here and there it’ll help them survive linguistically.

3. In many English language exams it is necessary to do gap-fill/cloze exercises. Students who
leave spaces because they don’t know the answer should, in my humble opinion, be deemed
‘too stupid to live’ and dealt with accordingly. Students taking exam courses should be
encouraged to make guesses left, right and centre in order to avoid ever leaving a space on an
exam paper. If nothing is written in the gap the student will receive no marks. If something is
written in the space there is a chance, a fair chance, that the answer will be right.
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Teaching Tip 7: Stopping an Activity


How:

1. If you have a small enough group that you can be heard by everyone, just say something like
‘OK, you can stop there. Well done everyone. Thank you, you can stop now. Yes, that includes
you, Giovanni!’ Then give the students a few seconds to finish their sentences until the room falls
quiet. Let them finish what they were saying.


2. If you have a big group so you won’t be heard if you try talk over everyone then don’t bother
to shout yourself hoarse, simply have a certain place in the classroom where you go and stand
when you want everyone’s attention and go and stand in it. The students will stop talking very
soon. (I stand in front of the board, facing the class which gets their attention because for the
previous ten minutes or so I’ve been cruising round the room monitoring). You can explain
to students at the beginning of the course, ‘when I want your attention I will stand here and you
will stop what you are doing and listen to me because I don’t like shouting for your attention.
Is that clear?’

When:
1. It’s not important if the students have finished the activity - it’s the taking part that counts,
as they say.


2. It’s a good idea to stop things while they are going swingingly because it means you never hit
the students’ boredom threshold. Leave them wanting more and enthusiasm will remain high.
On the other hand, don’t stop it too soon because not everyone will have had a chance to speak
or guess the answers yet so they’ll feel cheated.
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Teaching Tip 8: Feedback


How:


1. Ask one of the students what the answer to question 1 is. If s/he gets it right, fine. If not, ask if
anyone else knows the answer. (If nobody knows and nobody can guess, you’ll need to give
it to them).

2. Ask one of the students what the answer to question 2 is. If s/he gets it right, fine. If not, ask if
anyone else knows the answer. (If nobody knows and nobody can guess, you’ll need to give
it to them).

3. Ask one of the students what the answer to question 3 is. (Are you getting the hang of this?)
4. In the ‘True or False?’ activities on my worksheets, the feedback questions would be:
‘How many of your guesses were right?/How well do you know your partner?’/Which of your
partner’s answers surprised you?

Why:
Getting feedback from the students (i.e. information about what they’ve just done) means you
can check how they coped with the exercise. You don’t only need to get the answers. You can
find out if they liked that type of exercise or not - if not, can they suggest ways to improve it?
You can check their pronunciation. You can deal with queries. You can allow the feedback
session to develop into a class discussion, if you like. Whatever.

Extra info:
You can initiate a feedback session about the lesson as a whole as a filler (five-minute activity) to
fill the last few minutes of a lesson by asking the students to decide which of this lesson’s activities
was the most enjoyable/useful and why, then compare their choices with their partner’s or have an
open-class discussion about it where the whole group talks to you and airs their views.

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