ESL Teacher

Not too many people would argue on the question of giving homework to high school students. But once you get into the adult education world, then it gets a bit tricky.

As a basic principle, I think that homework for students learning English as a second language is totally essential. A key part of learning a language is, unfortunately, revising and remembering new words and practicing grammar structures, and repetition is a really important part of this – the kind of repetition that homework provides.

However, it all depends on the circumstances. For example, in Germany I taught high level managers who had English lessons twice a week before they started working (from 7.30am to 9.00am). These people worked long hours, had children and partners and houses to take care of after work, and barely had time for a hobby of their choice, let alone doing more English homework. Sure, they would’ve learnt faster if they’d been able to spend ten minutes a day revising their vocab lists, but I didn’t expect it.

On the other hand, students who come to Australia to study English full time often have some time each day to do some homework. Not all of them, however – those who need to work to support themselves might go directly from school to work and then only get home at midnight – at which time I’d prefer they got some sleep so they could stay awake in class the next day, rather than staying up later doing homework.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that being a strict teacher and demanding students complete their homework no matter what is not the way to deal with adult English learners. Be realistic, discuss the pros and cons with the students themselves, and perhaps provide optional homework for those that have the time.

If, like me, you’re lucky enough to be teaching a multicultural class of students who are living in an English-speaking country, then taking your students out into the “real world” is an absolutely justifiable way to improve their English. Getting a change of scenery and providing a place for them to put their English skills into practice in an environment where you can help them out can be a really productive time out of the classroom. Some of my favourite excursions in Perth include the following; adapt them for similar places in your local area:

• Caversham Wildlife Park – they can get hands-on with a lot of Australia’s amazing native animals, and the shy students are often able to get over their anxieties about speaking to native speakers because they want to ask the handlers questions about the animals.
• Swan Brewery – for a multicultural bunch of adult students, there’s no place that brings them together more than a place where they make beer. And since the brewery also gives tour groups the chance to taste a few of the beers, the students are able to relax a little; and the same thing applies about asking questions. Students in their twenties are pretty much universally fascinated by beer.
• Penguin Island – this is an island just off the coast south of Perth, and the best part from an English-learning viewpoint is it’s crawling with elderly volunteers who give their time to help conserve wildlife – and to chat with English learners about the penguins, pelicans and daily life there.
• The pub – for a quick hour or two at the end of the week, nothing beats getting the students around the corner to the pub where they’ll socialize with each other, practice ordering beer and as they get a little drunk and therefore bolder, start flirting with the bar staff – perfect English practice!

I love it when students write me farewell letters when they leave my class – I guess in my teaching job here in Australia about one in ten students who leave write me a card or a note before they return to their country. I got one from a Korean nicknamed George today, and like most of them, it was full of grammatical errors (oh! Did I teach him nothing?!) but also really full of heart. Some of the highlights:

When I came to school first time, I couldn’t understand what someone asked me. I said Yes or No, like stupid … Actually I didn’t talk so much during the study, because I am a man of reflection mind. So sometimes I made a mistake, sorry. I will go back to my country next week … I will never forget a memory that I spent time in Perth.

And for me, that’s what teaching is all about – sure, I hope that my students learn English grammar and vocabulary and can get a better job because they have better language skills, and all that – but above all, I really hope that they enjoy my classes and create some good memories. I figure that if students are happy and feel good in the classroom environment, then that’s the most important condition for them to actually learn something. For students who leave their own country to study English, it’s usually a really big decision – this student, for example, had been away from Korea for eleven months – and it’s a life-changing thing – something I’m really glad to be a part of.

I’ve been lucky enough to teach English in four different countries on three different continents. Now I’m going through a fairly settled down phase of life where I can’t see myself moving to another country again, at least not this decade or next. But I still like to dream about where I might end up teaching.

Friends I’ve made during my teaching career help inspire these dreams. One teaching couple I know have now taught in Poland, Slovakia, China, Turkey and Colombia – a fascinating list, to be sure – and are now on the road looking for their next stop. Others have headed to the Middle East or to Taiwan and Korea, and send me email dispatches describing what they like and dislike about their new teaching and living environments.

If I had a magic wand, I’d go and teach in the Maldives for six months. I once saw an ad from a resort in the Maldives looking for a teacher to teach English to their staff for two hours every morning, and the rest of the time you could do what you wanted and had a room at the resort with food provided. I know that the dream of resort life would fade pretty fast, but I’d love to curl up and write a few books while teaching a couple of hours every morning – at least for six months or so.

I’ve also always been intrigued by the idea of teaching in Morocco. I had an interview lined up for a job there once, but before the interview time came around I’d accepted my teaching job in Germany, which I took over Morocco because jobs in Germany were so hard to find – I could teach in Morocco “any time”. I haven’t, yet, but would still love to one day. It’s important to have dreams!

If you could teach anywhere in the world, where would it be? Let me know in the comments, please!

When I was teaching in a small school in Japan, students were randomly assigned to different teachers each time they came in. This meant that students would try to get particular teachers (although this was technically not allowed – but I’m sure it just depended on how well they got along with the front desk staff) – and conversely that teachers tried to get to teach particular classes.

I guess our students didn’t realise we were fighting over them, but one of the students we all wanted to teach was Takeshi. He was a teenage boy, I guess eighteen or nineteen years old, who had just finished school and was about to leave for a year in Australia – he’d won a scholarship to study there.

Takeshi was hilarious. Not only was he a human sponge – he would instantly remember any new phrase you taught him – but he was absolutely motivated to know everything about English-speaking culture. In some ways, I think, he didn’t fit very well into Japanese society and probably felt more at home speaking English than Japanese. He was hilarious and creative, and always made the lesson fun. When he eventually really did fly off to Australia, there was more than one teacher who was sad to see him go.

Students probably don’t realise this, but teachers know that having a few students like this can really make the difference between a good teaching job and a great one. Students who are so thrilled to learn really provide their teachers with a huge degree of satisfaction. I don’t know where Takeshi is now, but I’m sure he’s still having fun.

One of my all time favourite games, and one that my students often ask for, is the tried and tested game of Hangman. In fact, it surprises me just how much my students like it, but I’m pleased because it’s a great way to fill in a spare fifteen minutes or so at the end of the day and it does wonders for their spelling and vocabulary.

For me, the key part of having a successful Hangman game in my ESL classroom is to hype it up a bit. I always put them in teams (two or three, depending on the number of students) and give them a minute to come up with a team name. I use these team names regularly throughout the game and keep a points tally, encouraging each team to try to win this round, and doing tricks like giving double points for the last round if it means another team has a chance to win then.

When I’m choosing my words, I start out with some of the new vocabulary we have studied in class recently. At some stage I’ll throw in a red herring to make the class laugh a bit – “chocolate” is a favourite of mine (although when my students know me too well, then it’s also too obvious!), or something about the weekend, or even a hobby of one of the students or something!

Occasionally, especially with more advanced classes, I get the students to play the role of game master. I might let each one choose a word from a list, or get them to simply choose their own, but I only do this if it’s a class which is already accustomed to my style of Hangman.

I know it sounds immodest, but students tend to like me. I don’t really know why, but I’m fairly sure that one of the reasons is I always learn their names really quickly. It makes a huge difference if I can call on them in class by name, I think, because they tend to pay more attention, and feel that I’m taking a personal interest in their learning.

Some people are “good with names”, and some aren’t. I guess I fall into the former category, but there are still plenty of ways that any teacher can remember names faster:

• Make it a focus. If you accept that learning names is important and focus on activities that help you do that, you’re making a big step.
• Nametags and name cards. It’s so easy to get students to write their name on a folded piece of paper and leave it in front of them – especially in the first lesson or two.
• Ask students to stay in the same seats. It’s bad enough that they wear different clothes each lesson, but if you know where you can find a student the task is a lot easier. Once you’ve learned their names, you can let them sit wherever they want.
• Write their names on the board. I almost always write the names of all the students down one side of the whiteboard – and when it’s a new class, I write them in order of where they’re sitting. That way I can take a sneaky look at the board before I call upon the next student. It also helps them to know each other’s names, especially in a multi-nationality classroom where they might have trouble remembering names which are unusual to them.
• Word association. I have had more trouble remembering Korean and Chinese names than any others, mostly because they are two syllable, and tend to repeat themselves – that is, “Min” or “Mi” or “Su” might end up as the first or second syllable and in a male or female name – it’s confusing. I try to associate the syllables with English words that help me remember them.

I have a favourite activity to use when I’m teaching future tenses, especially for predictions using “will”. I copied it off a trainer in Japan, but I can’t remember who or I’d mention their name! In any case, many teachers use variations of it.

It’s easy: just get students to write down four or five different years, in the future. For example, 2010, 2015, 2020, and 2030. Just be careful if you’ve got older students and make sure you don’t tell them a year where it’s likely they’ll be dead.

Then ask them to write a “will” sentence predicting what will be happening to them in that year. For example, “In 2015 I’ll get married to a beautiful woman”, or “In 2030 I’ll be president of my country” – well, those are the kinds of examples my students usually come up with!

Once you have these basic sentences (which you can check and correct if you want) there are lots of ways to “play” with them – I love to use partners who become fortune tellers and they can predict whether these things will come true or not, and ask extra questions about them. It can turn into quite a hilarious lesson!

Funnily enough, the most memorable answer I ever had from a student is also the simplest. Yuko said something like “In 2040 I’ll walk down the street with my grandchildren”. It’s such a pure wish that I’ve never forgotten it, or the student who said it – one of the nicest I’ve ever met, and with such a good heart.

At the school I teach in currently, students study full-time in the same class with the same teacher for the whole week. It’s a requirement of the school (and in some cases, a government requirement for the visas the students study under) that we give them a test every Friday.

Every time I get new students and I mention the test, they groan and some of them pretend that the word “test” is not in their vocabulary yet. But over time, they come round to my way of thinking. The good thing is that their test result in my class is not actually used to calculate any grade or anything, so this works out here, but my philosophy still holds true for any test: I tell them tests are like medicine and they have to swallow gracefully!

Tests are not just evil ways to make students stressed, but I always say that tests are there to help students learn. If they practice their new grammar or revise the new words they’ve learnt that week, that helps them perform better in the test. If they don’t get 100% in the test then that’s fine too, because that means they learn something as we correct it. Otherwise it’s too easy for them and they’re not learning anything new!

On top of that, I always try to make the tests seem a little more interesting, and often include personalized questions using the students’ names. I love handing out the tests, watching them start serious work then hearing a few giggles as students get up to these questions. And then I tell them, see, tests aren’t as bad as you think.

I can’t draw.

I REALLY can’t draw.

If I was really ready to embarrass myself, I’d draw a little picture and paste it here. But I’m so bad at it that I don’t want to expose myself on the internet. It’s bad enough that hundreds and hundreds of my past students know it.

Unfortunately, drawing is a really useful skill for an ESL teacher. When someone doesn’t know what a word means, drawing a quick picture really can be worth a thousand words. However, in my case it’s not quite so valuable.

I especially have trouble differentiating between a moon and a banana. Kids and adults alike guess that what I’ve drawn is the opposite to what I’ve intended. And when I try to draw the shape of a country (like Australia), my students inevitably guess that I’ve drawn a potato.

So my tip is: get one of those how to draw books and try to teach yourself something. I’ve tried and I don’t think I’ll ever actually make a recognisable banana or moon, but I think I am a lost cause. Try to save yourself before it’s too late.

The up side of this drawing disability I have is that it helps students to laugh at me. And I (honestly) believe that’s very important. When the students know that the teacher is also not all-knowing, then they’re more likely to participate and not worry so much about making mistakes. And it can also give students a nice warm fuzzy feeling if I ask them to come up to the board and “correct” my drawing.