Making my lessons more student focused is something I need to work on, and I was hoping I might find some advice/tips/help here at Forumosa.
Although I have 3 years of EFL experience, I’ve had to make the best out of the jobs I’ve worked so far. In Thailand, teaching younger students, with class sizes over 30, I made the best of the situation, and I believe I did a great job of teaching the assigned material to the students and making English fun for them.
Here in Taiwan, my first job was in a ‘small town’ in the countryside, and the class sizes were again quite large. My boss was a great person, but she was ridiculously busy, and I had little support for my classes. My main worry was simply getting the students to complete their books and trying to instill discipline. I was the only foreign teacher (in the entire town), so I had no one to work with or bounce ideas off of.
I found it extremely tough to get the students to speak at that school. The best was just Question/Answer type things, or perhaps having the students run a dialogue in pairs (that I had written on the board).
… All of this is just to say, I’ve gotten in the very bad habit of not having a ‘student focused’ classroom. I seem to be talking WAY too much. I can make the excuse that it’s not really my fault, but it’s still become a weakness. Now that I’m in Taipei, and the standards are higher, I really need to change my style, and find ways of making my lessons more student focused.
So, I was really hoping some teachers here might be able to offer some advice on how to achieve a student focused classroom. And perhaps to offer some specific activities and exercises they’ve had success with.
And perhaps by sharing some ideas about this, all of us have the opportunity to learn something new.
That is sincere advice on my part. Sorry, I don’t do consulting on non-CI methods, so I can’t really help much in that regard. Well, I could – I used to be considered very good at making up all that stuff – but I don’t like to. Sorry.
TPRS is about as student-centered as it gets. All the content comes from the students.
I’ve been using and getting to know TPRS for the past few months. If you have Chinese ability and you are teaching monolingual classes, this method is second to none. Only my opinion though.
You can do it without Chinese. It does help to be fluent, but it can definitely be done without knowing Chinese.[/quote]
I didn’t mean you need to speak Chinese TPRS.
I meant, if you can speak Chinese and you are teaching monolingual classes, then you are wasting your time and energy using any other than TPRS. I feel like that after only a few months and I’m still learning the method but it really is very powerful.
[quote=“Oro”]Well, if you’re serious I’d be happy to.
Can’t say I expected much help, although I had my fingers crossed.
These forums seem particulary ungenerous when it comes to people asking for advice…[/quote]
Most of the regular posters don’t believe that S-S work is a good thing, so that’s probably why you aren’t receiving much advice. I am much better at working with adults than kids, but if you have an adult class this advice might help you.
If you want to increase student talk time (very useful during observations) then simply make everything in class pairwork. For example, before presenting the vocabulary for the class, introduce the topic then get them into pairs to brainstorm vocab. Then take it back to the board and write up/elicit/explain all the new words. Do this at every stage of the lesson. After any pairwork conversation put pairs together to discuss their conclusions. Think about every stage of the lesson and how you can let them talk to each other rather than listen to you. Now, before the TPRS gang get stuck in - I’m not saying that this is the best way to teach. I’m just answering the OP’s question.
I am not sure if Ironlady will agree with me but here goes.
You don’t need to run your entire lesson with TPRS. You might be forced to use a textbook and would then have to base your story somewhat around what is in the textbook. I do this all the time and it is great to ensure that the reading in the textbook later is more comprehensible. I even let the students rate out of ten (secretly and for me to know) how much of my story and how much of the story in the book they understood. You want to get to a 10 for both. then you can do extensions on the reading and pairwork as it is required in the textbook. Once words have been circled into comprehension, they may not be used immediately, but in my experience, students are a lot more willing to speak English if they are discussing a story they feel they have had some vested interest in. A common thing for me would be to discuss the story we did in contrast to the one in the book and tell me which one you like better and why. It is irrelevant to me if beginners use some Chinese to discuss this but their feedback needs to be in English. You can then always use this feedback to improve what you are doing.
