Learning a new language can be difficult, so teaching a new language inherently comes

with great obstacles. To effectively teach English to someone new to the language, you
have a lot to understand, including the basics of the English language, how speakers
acquire a new language, and how to motivate students to succeed when they are
struggling. In this module, we will discuss the basics of how to get started, including taking
a hard look at how to access the motivations of new students, how to use their previous
language and cultural background to your advantage, and how to get them started on the
path to English fluency.

Module 1: Teaching and learning

1.1 Motivation

1.2 Understanding cultural backgrounds

1.3 The importance of a first language

1.4 Getting started

1.1 Motivation

Teaching any subject involves knowing how motivation affects a student. Without proper
motivation, it will be difficult for students to accept what they are learning and commit to the
process. Since learning a new language can be especially hard it is even more important
that you, as the teacher, understand the motivation behind your students commitment to
learning, and use it to your advantage. We will start discussing motivation by breaking it
down into its two smaller parts: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.

1.1.1 Intrinsic motivation

Intrinsic motivation is the best stepping stone to success, but you can't teach it. Intrinsic
motivation characterizes someone who is compelled to do something for internal rewards.
This type of motivation is powerful because extrinsic rewards can be fleeting or
disappointing, but an internal drive to succeed will almost always motivate an individual.
While you cannot teach someone to be intrinsically motivated, you can help your students
access intrinsic motivation that they may not know is already there or that they may have
lost for the moment. If you know your students are intrinsically motivated, you can help
them succeed. Here are some tips you can follow:
 Get to the root of what is driving the individual. While they may only
acknowledge an extrinsic motivation for learning English, you may be able to help them tie
that to a grander internal drive. For example, if students come to you wanting to learn
English because they are moving to an English speaking country and it will be helpful to
know, the superficial part of their reasoning points toward extrinsic motivation. However,
this extrinsic motivator points to something internal: the desire to fit in and not feel like an
outsider.

Understand the basis for most forms of intrinsic motivation. William

Glasser, an American psychiatrist, published a theory in 1998 that proposed that humans
have essential needs that dictate our emotional health. These needs are the need to
belong or connect, the need for power or competence, the need for freedom, and the
need to have fun. Having these needs in mind could help you when designing your
lessons. Which of these needs is this lesson satisfying? This is a way to get away from
the punishment and reward system that is meant to access an individual’s extrinsic
motivation.

Be aware that intrinsic motivation cannot be forced and does not abide by
the classic reward and punishment system that many follow. For example, if someone is
not reacting to your lessons, it will not be helpful to intentionally make them feel that they
don’t belong. For intrinsic motivation to succeed, the individual needs to feel that they are in
control of the situation, so try to access your students’ internal drive, but don’t try to force
one on them.

1.1.2 Extrinsic motivation

While extrinsic motivation is not nearly as strong as intrinsic motivation, it is much easier as
the teacher for you to control. Extrinsic motivation refers to when an individual is compelled
to do something because of an outside reward. Because of the ease at which it can be
used to teach someone, extrinsic motivators are often the basis for educational programs.
The most common extrinsic motivator is grades, with which teachers can very simply
reward good behaviour and punish bad behaviour (behaviour here refers to whatever the
student is expected to do). A student who hands in his or her project, follows directions,
and effectively addresses the prompt or purpose of the project is rewarded with an A, and a
student who does not is punished with an F.

Why it works

Even though the drive caused by extrinsic motivation pales in comparison to the drive that
is caused by intrinsic motivation, that does mean that you cannot find success with extrinsic
motivation. These motivators access an individual’s innate desire to find success even if
someone else defines that success. Here are some examples of extrinsic motivators that
work in the classroom:

Grades: This is the most obvious extrinsic motivator. Individuals want to be

successful and feel better when they receive a high score as opposed to a low score. If
you teach in a high school setting, grades can mean the difference as to whether or not the
student gets into college (or a good college), so grades can be a good motivator for
students. Even when there is no next level, however, many students will be motivated to
succeed by grades.

Competition: Many individuals have an innate desire to be winners, and

putting your students in competition with each other can be a good way to motivate them to
succeed, especially if the ongoing results are available to all students. This approach is
often used by teachers of younger students with such things as performance charts, where
teachers give students who do well some sort of visible reward, such as a gold star.
Conversely, teachers can punish negative behaviours by posting the name of the student
in question on the board as someone who is not behaving. This can sometimes help
motivate students to succeed because they would like to do better than their classmates.

Extra rewards and punishments: Besides grades, some teachers will offer extra incentive to
succeed, perhaps in the form of prizes. A teacher might, for example, make an agreement
with a student that if he or she improves, then he or she can go on the class trip.
Conversely, punishments, such as detentions or phone calls home, can be a consequence
that motivates a student.

1.1.3 Which type of motivation is better?

While intrinsic motivation is stronger than extrinsic motivation, it is not very immediate and
therefore can lose effect in the short term. Extrinsic motivation can be very helpful in the
short term, but it is often only temporary. For that reason, the best type of motivation is a
combination of the two. Even students with intrinsic motivation sometimes need to be
motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments to keep them on track. Here are some
examples of how you can use both intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation to help
your students:
 • We’ll start with an example we have previously used: an individual would like
to learn English because she is moving to an English-speaking country. Whether or not she
realizes it, this can be an example of intrinsic motivation and her need to fit in and be
successful. You can help her access this by asking her to write down the reasons why she
thinks it would be helpful to learn English and then look deeply into those reasons. While
this desire can be a strong motivator, you may find that this student begins slacking off
during your lessons. She may be having trouble seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
Using extrinsic motivators, such as grades or rewards, can help her get over the hurdle and
back on track. The lasting motivation that will drive her to succeed is the need to fit in, but
the temporary motivation of grades or a reward will help her succeed when she is having
trouble seeing the finish line.

A man comes to you and tells you he wants to learn English so he can get a
promotion and make more money in his corporate career. While money and prestige are
both extrinsic motivators, the need for approval and competence is intrinsic. This is an
individual who is driven by the desire to succeed, so extrinsic motivators will be very
effective on him. If he wants to use this as a way of advancing his career, then he will likely
want to learn English while attaining the highest grades or scores possible so he can flaunt
his success. This is the extrinsic carrot that you can use to help him succeed.

A woman feels stuck in a job that is stifling and wants to pursue a career that
requires her to know English and comes to you for help. This individual is intrinsically
motivated by her need for control and freedom. She is less likely to be motivated by outside
influences, and more likely to be motivated by a less overbearing and prescribed teaching
style. However, she may still require some extrinsic motivators to continue striving for
success, so you may need to let her frame her own definition of success and then grade
her on the framework she created. This will give her the freedom she wants while still
holding her personally accountable for her actions.

1.2 Understanding cultural backgrounds

One of the first steps you need to take as an educator when you are trying to help
someone learn a new language is to take their cultural background into account. You
cannot help someone get somewhere new without first understanding where they are
coming from.
Instead of trying to present to you all of the potential cultural backgrounds that your
students could be bringing to the table (which could be an entire course in itself), we are
instead going to focus on why it is important to consider your students’ backgrounds and
why it can be useful to adjust your instruction to better address the varying backgrounds of
your students.
1.2.1 Why is it important to understand your students’ cultural backgrounds?

Language is directly related to culture because language is fluid and changes over time as
the culture of a region changes. This is why such languages as Italian and French can both
originate from Latin but still be fundamentally different. Latin was taken to these regions,
and it developed as the culture of the regions developed, taking two very different paths in
Italian and French. So, as much as it is important to teach cultural elements as you teach
English, it is important to take into account the importance of an individual’s cultural origins.
These cultural backgrounds can not only affect the way they learn a new language but also
the way they learn in general. Here are some ways that an individual’s cultural background
can affect his or her learning a new language:

A student’s environment can have an enormous effect on the way they learn.
Studies have shown that language acquisition is considerably affected by an individual’s
background, and while learning a new language isn’t the same as learning your first
language, environment can still be important in an individual learning a second language. A
student who comes from a home that values education comes from a home that nurtures
what he or she is learning. A student who comes from a home that values life experience
over formal education might have more difficulty with traditional lessons.

Students from various cultural backgrounds will react to different styles of

teaching in different ways. Some of your students may be coming from a background of
very strict, teacher-led instruction. Others may be coming from a background of more free,
student-led instruction. While both styles have merit, you will find yourself needing to use
differentiation to properly reach both of these students. You can determine how to best
meet the needs of your students by simply asking them either through an informal
conversation or a more standard pretest. Let your students tell you how they learn best,
and try to adjust your teaching to appeal to their needs.

An individual’s cultural background can affect the way they think, which
can greatly affect the student’s performance in your classroom. Taking your students’
cultural backgrounds into account when you are designing and implementing your
instruction will help you account for the potential different ways that your students think.

1.3 The importance of a first language

More important than understanding your students’ cultural background is

understanding how their first language will affect the speed and ease with which they
learn English as a new language. While a student’s cultural background can affect the
way they learn, a student’s native language can affect the way they view language to
begin with. What are some of the obstacles that students may face when trying to learn
English as a second language?
1.3.1 Language barriers

Every language has its own rules, and while many languages share similarities that make
new language acquisition simpler, some students will be trying to transition to a new set
of rules and language structure. Here are some examples of how language is structured
differently in different languages:

Some languages have been created based on symbols or pictures

that represent ideas rather than words made up of letters. The transition to English
from languages that follow such a structure can be very difficult.

Some languages are read from right to left rather than left to right, which is
how English is read. This does not necessarily affect a student’s ability to gain proficiency
in speaking the language, but it certainly presents a hurdle for students who are trying to
learn to read English.

Many languages require a different sentence structure than English does.

One of the most common examples of this is when languages place adjectives differently in
a sentence than they are placed in English. While in English someone might say “go get
the blue car,” that same sentence in some languages would translate back to English as
“go get the car blue.” This can make fluency difficult.

Many students will be confused by the way verbs are conjugated in

English. Many languages besides English have fairly set rules that apply to the
conjugation of most verbs, while English can seem like a free-for-all at times.

1.3.2 How can we use our students’ native languages to our advantage?

While a new language like English will certainly present obstacles for your students to
overcome, there are ways you can take those obstacles and turn them into advantages. If
your students are coming to the class already understanding a language other than
English, why not use that to help them learn better? Here are some ways that teachers can
use a student’s native language to help them learn a new language:

It is important that you understand cognates and how to use them. A

cognate is a word or root word that is used in different languages and has a similar
etymological background. In other words, you can provide a link for your students between
their native language and English. These cognates can be little pockets of comfort for your
students as they tread into the unknown territory of a new language.

Developing further on the above point, emphasize breaking words down to

their roots as you are teaching them. This helps students have a better understanding of
the patterns of the English language, which will help them succeed more quickly. This
makes it easier for the students to link the two languages through cognates, but it also
makes it easier for students to make connections between new words they are learning.

Using different texts is a good way to help students ease into the new
language. Providing a translated version of the text may change the structure,
connotation, and intent, but it will give them a frame of reference for when they get stuck.
Translated texts can be a crutch for new language learners, but if they are used properly,
they can simply work as a guide to help students feel more comfortable with a new
language.

Try asking questions in the student’s native language, but ask them to
answer in English. Or switch it around and ask them questions in English that they need to
answer in their native language. This may be more work for you, depending on the diversity
of your classroom, but it can help students ease into understanding English.

Use your students’ native language to help scaffold and model in English.
This can be as simple as having your students write in their native language and then
showing them how it would look in English. You could then ask them to do the same thing
following your model. Unfortunately, this may require you to be fluent in many languages,
but you can work through it with the student if you don’t speak their native language.

Have your students help each other. Even if the students do not speak
the same native language, they are going through the same process and can bond in
their desire to learn English and really help each other learn.

1.4 Getting started

It is no mystery that teaching students a new language is a very difficult task, but it can be
infinitely rewarding. So, how do you actually get started on your career? The first step, of
course, you have already taken, which is to seek training. Let’s take a look at some other
important aspects of successfully helping your students.

1.4.1 Ensuring your success

Here are some basic tips to ensure you are successful and able to help your students learn
English as a second language:

Make sure that you are well versed in the structure and makeup of the
English language. We will discuss many things you need to know, but it couldn’t hurt to
supplement this course with further study of the language. The English language is
incredibly complex
and full of rules that are not necessarily logical, so it will always help you to study up.

While we will give you many of the tools you need to become an effective
teacher of English as a second language, it is important that you continually seek out
research and professional journal articles to keep up with current educational trends. We
are constantly finding out more and more about how we attain language and how we learn,
so teaching English as a second language is a lifelong educational commitment.

Make sure you understand how learners acquire new knowledge. As we

have discussed earlier in this module, that does not just refer to language acquisition but to
knowledge acquisition as a whole. Learn everything you need to know about differentiation
(which we will discuss at length in a future model) to give your students the best chance to
succeed in learning their new language.

Be prepared to be patient. If you do not come from a teaching background,

you may not be aware of the patience it takes to help someone learn something new. If
you do come from a teaching background, then understand that this may be the most
difficult thing to teach someone, and that you will need to be even more patient than you
may have expected.

Continually use your experiences to build a wealth of knowledge of strategies

and concepts that work for your students. All of the training in the world will help you, but
the true answers to your questions of “how?” will come from experience. Make sure that you
don’t forget any of the lessons you learn along the way.

1.4.2 Understanding the basics

There is a basic framework you will need to follow to be successful in helping students
learn a new language. While we will discuss most of these concepts in detail in future
modules, here is an overview to help get you started on your path to success:

Linguistics: Helping your students understand the basics of linguistics will

help ensure that they understand the basics of how the English language is structured, how
we break down and diagram the components of a sentence, and how we communicate in
English. This concept will give the students a structure on which to build their true
understanding of the language.

Reading: Reading is one of the first skills you will try to develop with your
students. It is typically where most teachers of English as a second language begin
because having the words in front of the student can make him or her feel more
comfortable trying to decipher them. Students can learn to see the words and sound them
out with the guidance of the word in front of them.
 Writing: The next step is usually to work on your students’ skills in writing in
English. They will still have the guidance of the words in front of them as they do when
they learn to read, but it requires them to take the next step because they will be the ones
producing the words. This is a great time for students to really work on some of the
linguistic principles they have already studied and practice sentence structure, syntax, and
other basic concepts of English.

Speaking: Speaking can be the most difficult part of learning a new language.
Having to sound the words out loud can add an extra level of anxiety because everyone in
the class will hear the student if he or she makes a mistake. Creating a classroom of
respect and support can go a long way to assuage your students’ anxiety. If the student
feels comfortable enough that he or she is not afraid to make mistakes in front of the class,
he or she will be more willing to take risks.

Listening: While listening is arguably a more difficult skill than speaking

concerning a new language, students often feel more comfortable with it because they are
not required to put themselves out there as much. However, listening is the next step after
the students begin learning to speak the language. If a student can listen to something in
English, comprehend it, and respond properly, he or she is exhibiting a complex
understanding of the language and is usually doing it without a visual reference (besides
body language).

Module 2: Linguistics

Linguistics is the study of language and its structure, and is an invaluable tool for
individuals who are trying to learn a new language. As we begin to think about how we are
going to help our students read, write, speak, and listen to a new language, we need to
prepare to give them the basics in structure that will help them understand the overall
structure of the English language. In this module, we will discuss all of the major aspects of
linguistics, including phonology, lexicology, morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics.
By studying these concepts yourself, you will be better prepared to help your students learn
them in the future.

Module 2: Linguistics

2.1 Phonology

2.2 Morphology

2.3 Lexicology
2.4 Syntax

2.5 Semantics

2.1 Phonology

Phonology is the study of the sound and structure of a language. Essentially, phonology
concerns itself with the mental representation of a sound. Understanding phonology
means you understand how to break down a word into its smaller sounds and pronounce
it. This can help a student learning English because it gives him or her a great tool for
breaking down new words and pronouncing words that he or she has not necessarily seen
before.
Let’s take a look at some of the basic concepts within phonology.

2.1.1 Basics of phonology

You can’t study phonology without discussing phonetics, but for the purposes of this
course, phonology is more important. Phonology deals with how we mentally break down
the pronunciation of words, while phonetics deals with producing the sounds, therefore
phonology is more relevant for people who are learning a new language, not learning
spoken language for the first time.

In phonology, words are broken down into smaller units that represent sounds, to make it
easier to pronounce new words. If a student understands the common sound units in the
English language, he or she will be able to sound out most words, making language
acquisition much more comfortable. Here is a break down of some of those units of sound:

Phonemes: A phoneme is a unit of sound that when replaced changes the sound of a word
in a particular language. English is a complicated language for people to learn because
even though there are twenty-six letters, there are forty-four phonemes. These phonemes
represent all iterations of sounds that a letter can make. For example, a “c” can sound like
a “k” or an “s,” depending on its position in a word. If an individual understands phonemes,
he or she will understand all the different sounds in the English language. Phonemes are
broken down into two categories: vowels and consonants.
Vowels: A vowel is an open sound that is spoken without blockage from the lips or tongue.
Vowels can be difficult because they are very versatile and shift and change a lot
depending on the word in which they appear. Vowels are typically broken down into the
following categories:

Single vowels

Short vowels

Schwa

Long vowels

Diphthongs

Consonants: Consonants are sounds that are spoken with obstruction from the lips, teeth,
or tongue. Just like vowels, they can be complicated to understand because there are so
many variations of similar sounds. Consonants can be broken down into the following
categories:

Voiced consonants

Unvoiced consonants

Minimal pair: Two words that differ in meaning because they contain one phoneme that is
different are called minimal pairs. Minimal pairs are often words that rhyme or at least form
a near rhyme.

Phone: A phone is the smallest unit of sound and refers to the way in which an individual
pronounces a sound. It can therefore exist in more than one language. This is different
from a phoneme, which refers specifically to the sound that is assigned to a letter or group
of letters in a given language. For this reason, phones can be universal to all languages,
while phonemes are specific to individual languages

Accents: When a syllable or sound within a word is given more attention than the others.
This changes the way an individual pronounces a word:
 Stress accent, dynamic accent, or stress: When an accented syllable is also
given a change in pitch and volume, it is referred by any of these three names.

Pitch accent: When the accented syllable is differentiated through a change

in only the pitch with which it is pronounced.

Quantitative accent: When the accented syllable is differentiated through

only a lengthening of the syllable.

Intonations: A change in the pitch of a word or syllable that does not change the meaning
of the word or syllable but rather indicates any of a number of different situations, including:

Revealing the feelings of the speaker.

Identifying the phrase as a question or distinguishing between different types

of questions.

Giving importance to a word or phrase in the statement or question.

2.2 Morphology

Morphology is very closely related to phonology in that it is concerned with the structure of
language. Specifically, however, morphology deals with the structure a language’s
morphemes, phonemes, and other linguistic units. The English language relies heavily on
morphology, especially regarding English language acquisition. Understanding the
morphological relationship between two words can help an individual recognize a similar
morphological relationship between two different words, which helps them better
understand new words and phrases. For example, if an individual can recognize the
morphological relationship between the words “heart” and “monitor” in the phrase “heart
monitor,” then he or she can use that to understand other complex nouns. Using this
knowledge, an English language learner can take an educated guess to determine what
the phrase “hall monitor” means.
2.2.1 Basics of morphology

To truly understand morphology, one must fully understand morphemes, which are the
basis of the area of study. While phonemes refer to the sounds that make up the structure
of words, morphemes are the physical structural units in a word.

Morphemes: Morphemes are sometimes referred to as the smallest linguistic unit that
carries meaning. While phonemes are smaller, they essentially build towards pronunciation
rather than meaning. Breaking a word into its morphemes allows an individual to separate
and (better understand) the root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Here is an example:

In the sentence, “Send these schematics down to the marketers.” the word, “marketers” has
3 morphemes.

Morpheme 1: Market. The root of the word that carries the major meaning of the word.
This word could stand alone and make sense if it needed to (though not in the sentence
we plucked it from). This morpheme is called the free lexical morpheme.

Morpheme 2: -er. This is the suffix that is added to the word, carrying with it the inherent
meaning of “one who does something.” Understanding the suffix allows a student to
understand that a marketer is one who markets. This morpheme is called the bound lexical
morpheme.

Morpheme 3: -s. This letter is added so that the amount is clear and that the word fits in the
sentence grammatically with the intended meaning. The sentence would still make sense
without this morpheme, but it would change the meaning. This morpheme is called the
bound grammatical morpheme.

In the above example, we discussed some classifications for morphemes. Let’s look
closer at these three classifications.
Free lexical morpheme: This term is used to describe a morpheme that can exist on its
own and make sense. In the previous example, the free lexical morpheme was “market.”
Alone, “market” is a word. Conversely, “er” is not a word that can exist on its own and still
make sense. While in this case the free lexical morpheme was the root word, it does not
have to be. The word “classroom” is composed of two free lexical morphemes—“class” and
“room.”

Bound lexical morpheme: This term is used to describe a morpheme that is bound to
another morpheme lexically and cannot make sense without it. This term often refers to
prefixes and suffixes that are added to words to adjust their meaning. These morphemes
cannot function alone and serve to simply modify the meaning of the free lexical morpheme
to which they are attached.

Bound grammatical morpheme: This term is used to describe a morpheme that is bound
to another morpheme and serves the purpose of helping its word fit into a sentence
grammatically. In the following example, notice the importance of the bound grammatical
morpheme (we will use “s” in the same way we used it in the previous example). In the
phrase, “John threw two balls to Mike,” the “s” in the word “balls” is the bound grammatical
morpheme. The sentence would not make grammatical sense without it, as it would read
“John threw two ball at Mike.”

Free grammatical morpheme: While we did not clearly identify this in the previous
examples, free grammatical morpheme is a term used to describe morphemes that are not
bound to other morphemes but are there to serve a grammatical purpose. Usually, these
words are articles, conjunctions, and prepositions. In the sentence above, “John threw the
ball at Mike,” “at” is a free grammatical morpheme.

Understanding these basic concepts can help a new language learner get a sense of how a
language is structured and help them be able to make connections and learn new words
and phrases more easily.

2.3 Lexicology

Lexicology is the study of words and therefore includes elements of many other aspects
of linguistics that we will discuss in this module. When we study words in lexicology, we
look closely at how words are formed, what makes them different from other words,
uniform
rules that affect usage and/or conjugation, and the different connotations and meanings of
synonyms. All of these ideas will help your students move from understanding the sounds
that make up the English language to understanding the words that make up the English
language. Here is an overview of some of the basic principles of lexicology and its
associated vocabulary:

2.3.1 Basics of lexicology

To understand lexicology, it is important to break it down into its smaller parts to look at
how each works to create the overall study of lexicology. A clear understanding of
lexicology and its basic principles and terminology will help you and your students find more
success by easing their understanding of words and their function within a sentence.

Lexeme: A lexeme is a lexicological unit of linguistics, which, for the most part, refers to a
root word. The lexeme is the part of a word (even if that is the whole word) that imparts
the most meaning, with conjugation or prefixes and suffixes added to adjust the meaning.
In other words, the word “snow” is a lexeme, and all iterations of that word, such as
“snows,” “snowed”, or “snowing,” all share this same lexeme. By breaking down words to
their roots, students can better break down new words, connect to a word’s etymology, or
even find a cognate they can relate to.

Lexical items: Whereas a lexeme is the root of a word, a lexical item is the entirety of a
word or phrase that imparts meaning. In our previous example, we mentioned that “snows,”
“snowed,” and “snowing” all have the same lexeme, which is “snow.” In that example, all of
those words are different lexical items. A lexical item can also be a combination of words,
such as “class work,” or a phrase, such as “in the way.” Essentially, lexical items are the
units in a sentence that have separate meaning.

Word forms: The term “word forms” encompasses all the iterations of a similar lexeme. In
other words, some word forms of the lexeme “go” are “goes,” “went,” and “will go.” This
term is used to describe the different conjugations of a verb, the different tenses of a word,
or the different forms of a word based on amount.
Another important idea that would be helpful to know is that lexicology also
encompasses lexical structure, which deals with the structure of words and their parts.
Let’s take a closer look at lexical structure:

Lexical structure: Lexical structure refers to the internal structure of lexemes as well as the
structure of the lexicon of a language. The “lexicon” is just a fancy term for all of the words
in a group.

Paradigms: Differences in meaning that rely on the substitution of words. In

other words, if you look closely at a phrase, like “Bill ran to his truck”, making a
paradigmatic change would require a substitution. This would result in a different phrase,
like “Bill ran to his wife,” or “Frank ran to his truck”. These changes completely change the
meaning of the sentence because different subjects and objects can be substituted.

Syntagms: These are differences that result from the positioning of words in a
phrase. In other words, to make a syntagmatic change in a sentence, you would change
the order of the words to adjust the meaning of the sentence. For example, if the sentence
“Johnny threw the ball to Mary” is changed to “Mary threw the ball to Johnny,” then the
difference is syntagmatic.

Co-text: We will discuss semantic ideas in detail later in the module, but this term is
relevant to both aspects of linguistics. The co-text of a word is the linguistic context, which
means that it is the linguistic meaning of a word or the meaning that a word inherently
carries with it.

Context: Context is another semantic term but also a concept that even laymen know.
The context of a word is the words and sentences around it that give it meaning.
Whereas co- text covers the various meanings that can be attributed to a word, the
context refers to the specific meaning of the word that is intended based on the
surrounding words and sentences.

2.4 Syntax
Now that we have learned about how sounds and words are created, it is time to discuss
how sentences are formed. Syntax is the set of rules that govern the grammatical
construction of sentences in a language. For English, these rules are fairly complicated, but
let’s take a close look at some of the basic ideas behind English grammar and syntax.

2.4.1 Basics of syntax

To understand syntax, we have to look more closely at all of the parts that make up a
sentence. The first step is to understand how sentences are classified:

Clausal sentence (simple sentence): A clausal sentence is a simple sentence that contains
only one clause or one complete proposition (subject and predicate). For example, the
sentence “Gloria is going to the store” contains only one clause, which includes a subject
(“Gloria), a verb (“is going”), and an object (“the store”).

Compound sentence: A compound sentence is a sentence that consists of more than one
clause (known in this case as coordinating clauses because they work together to
complete an idea). For example, the sentence “Maryann went to the mall and got a new
shirt” is a compound sentence containing the clauses “Maryann went to the mall” and “got
a new shirt.” In the second clause, the subject (“Maryann) is implicit.

What about the words that make up these clauses? The English language has
innumerable rules for how words should be structured and organized within a sentence.
The first categories you need to know to understand these rules, though, are the parts of
speech.

Noun: A noun is word that describes a person, place, thing, or idea.

Verb: A verb describes an action or a state of being.

Adjective: An adjective is a word that modifies a noun.

Adverb: An adverb is a word that modifies a verb, an adjective, or another

adverb.

Preposition: A preposition is a word that describes the relationship between a

verb and its object.
Pronoun: A pronoun is a more general word that takes the place of a specific
noun.

Conjunction: A conjunction is a word that links two coordinating clauses.

Now that we know the parts of speech, we can begin diagramming sentences.Here is an
example of a sentence with all the parts of speech labelled:

Lei quickly ran down the dark street to find and catch his dog.

Lei -Noun

quickly

-Adverb ran

-Verb

down -Preposition

the -Adjective (article)

dark -Adjective

street -Noun

to @Preposition

find -Verb

and-Conjunction

catch -Verb

his

-Pronoun

dog - noun

While it would be impossible for us to cover every single syntactical rule in the English
language, here are a few more that are directly relevant to your students who are learning
English for the first time:

Every sentence needs at least a subject and a predicate. The subject of the
sentence is the noun that is acting or being. The predicate is the phrase that consists of the
verb and the object (not every sentence needs an explicit object).
 The verb and the subject of the sentence need to agree, meaning that if
you are using a plural noun, you need to use the plural form of a verb.

For the most part, the best way to frame a sentence is in active rather
than passive voice. This means the sentence, “Sammy threw the ball to Jane”, is more
grammatically sound than if it were passive and written: “The ball was thrown to Jane
by Sammy”.

Verb tense needs to agree throughout a piece of writing or spoken language.

If the first verb you use is in past tense, then all subsequent verbs with the same intention
should be past tense.

2.5 Semantics

We have successfully worked our way up to understanding how sentences are

structured, and now it is time to discuss words again, but this time we will look at the
connotative and complex meanings that they carry. Semantics is a branch of linguistics
that involves the study of words and their meanings.

2.5.1 Theories of semantics

Typically, the concept of semantics is divided into three theories of semantics: formal
semantics, lexical semantics, and conceptual semantics. Each of these types of semantics
delves into the true meanings of words and will help your students understand the
intricacies of the English language.

Formal semantics: Formal semantics is a very mathematical theory that strives to

understand the meaning of words by forming exact mathematical principles and ideals that
speakers and writers can use. People who subscribe to the formal semantics theory look
for the relationship between how language forms and the world in which it forms to try to
understand how people create meaningful discourse.

Lexical semantics: Lexical semantics is a theory that the meaning of a word is understood
by looking at its context. In this way, sentences can be broken down into semantic
constituents or words and phrases that carry meaning and context. This theory promotes
the analysis of how words and phrases play off each other to build meaning.
Conceptual semantics: Conceptual semantics is a theory that highlights the importance of
the internal structure of words. Theorists believe that the best way to understand the
meaning of a word in a sentence is to look at the word itself, its internal structure, and how
it combines different, smaller elements.

2.5.1 Extending word meaning

Truly understanding the English language means understanding the complexities of the
language that allow speakers of the language to build different layers of meaning in their
speech. Understanding these complexities takes a strong grasp of semantics and the
ability to analyze context. When we talk about word meaning, we can generally break it
down into two categories:

Denotation: Denotation rrefers to the literal meaning of a word. You can easily find the
denotation for a word in the dictionary. With synonyms, the denotation is similar or the same.

Connotation: Connotation refers to the implied meaning that the word often has because the
word is used to describe something beyond what the denotation states. Take a look at two
synonyms, such as “skinny” and “thin.” If you use these two words to describe a person,
their denotations are pretty much the same, but the connotation behind “skinny” is more
negative than the connotation behind “thin.” Thin implies someone who is at a healthy
weight, while skinny implies that the person is frail or weak. It takes true understanding of a
language to get such small, but important complexities of meaning.

Because of the complexity of language, speakers and writers can build meaning that
is implicit rather than explicit and sometimes difficult to decipher even for the most
fluent English speaker.

Literal language: Literal language is when a speaker or writer directly describes what they
mean.

Figurative language: When the writer builds meaning that goes beyond the literal meaning.
Here are some examples of figurative language:
 Metaphors

Similes

Personification

Irony

Symbolism

2.5.3 More semantic terminology

Beyond what we already described, there are important terms within the study of
semantics you should be aware of.

Synonymy: This word literally translates to “sameness of meaning” and is the root of the
word “synonym.” As we displayed in our discussion of connotation, however, while two
words can be synonyms, they do not necessarily mean the same thing. If two words
meant exactly the same thing, then one would be extraneous. Synonyms are necessary
because they represent the detail and specificity of the English language.

Hyponymy: This term literally translates to “inclusion of meaning” and essentially refers
to words that belong in groups. A fork is a hyponym of silverware because it is a
member of the silverware group.

Antonymy: This term literally translates to “oppositeness of meaning,” which means that
antonyms are meant to be opposites. It is very difficult to find an exact antonym for
most words, however, so words are often paired up because they’re close to being
antonyms, much like how synonyms have similar but not exact meanings.

Incompatibility: This term literally translates to “mutual exclusiveness within the same
subordinate category,” which means that it refers to two members of a group that are
different entities. For example, cats and dogs are both animals, so they would fit under the
purview of this term.
Homonymy: Thisis a term that refers to when two words sound the same even though they
have different meanings. These can be especially confusing to new language learners
because they require a strong idea of context to identify. A good example of a group of
homonyms is “there,” “their,” and “they’re.”

Polysemy: This term refers to when a word has more than one meaning. This is different
from a homonym because the spelling of the word does not change depending on the
meaning. For example, the word “close” can refer to two items that are in near proximity
to each other, or it can refer to something being shut.

Module 3: Reading

Reading is extremely important in learning a new language and requires a lot of effort from
new English language learners. To be able to read fluently, students need to be able to
recognize sounds and patterns, comprehend the words they read, and understand how
the words work together in a sentence to convey meaning. In this module, we will break
down reading into smaller parts so that you can help your students successfully find
proficiency in the skill. In doing so, we will cover how to work on beginning reading skills,
how to transition into more difficult decoding, and how new readers can gain meaning from
what they are reading. The ultimate goal is to help your students understand the language
so that they can not only read and understand words in English but also understand how
they work together to convey true meaning.

Module 3: Reading

3.1 Developing reading skills

3.2 Auditory and visual discrimination

3.3 Forming associations

3.4 Decoding3.5 Reading for purpose

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Reading

3.1 Developing reading skills

Imagine that teaching a student to read in a new language is like building a house. You
cannot start off by building the attic; you have to work your way up from the bottom. As we
discuss how to help students develop reading skills, we will start with the basics, move on
to lower-level reading skills, such as comprehension, and eventually discuss such higher-
level reading skills as identifying purpose and intent.

3.1.1 Beginning to read

As you begin to approach reading with your students, it is important to remember that all of
them may be coming from different backgrounds and therefore may need different levels of
instruction. For students whose original language does not share the English alphabet, that
is where you need to start. For students from all native languages that share an alphabet
with English, though, it is important that you go over the way words are sounded out
because even if the students are familiar with the English alphabet, the sounds of this new
language will likely be unique and somewhat foreign.
Phonemic awareness: We discussed phonemes in detail in the previous module when we
reviewed linguistics, but it is important to also mention phonemic awareness here because
it is such an important part of the reading process. To help your students improve their
phonemic awareness, you will expect your students to be able identify, understand, and
manipulate phonemes. Helping your students gain phonemic awareness will give them the
ability to break down and learn new words by themselves.

Phonemes are unique to each language, so your students may have difficulty adjusting to
learning new ones. They will likely need help understanding the structure of new
phonemes and understanding how to sound them out.

Your students may naturally think of the phonemes in their native language, which could
be in direct contrast with English phonemes. If you are aware of phonemes in your
students’ native languages, you can use this to your advantage. Otherwise, it may be a
good idea to try to train them to avoid this kind of thinking.

Making the process of improving phonemic awareness more fun and active is an effective
way to increase engagement and understanding. Try activities that turn phonemic
awareness into a game or require your students to get up, move around, and be active.

3.1.2 Beginning to read

Phonics: The concept behind phonics is that students can begin to see and understand
patterns in how phonemes relate to each other. Once they recognize these patterns,
students can more easily sound out words that are foreign to them. This can also help them
understand meaning when they begin to see patterns in root words, prefixes, and suffixes.
English is notorious for straying away from patterns, however, so while phonics can be a
helpful tool, it certainly has its shortcomings.

Learning the alphabet: Some of your students may not need to learn the alphabet because
the English alphabet is the same as their native language’s alphabet. However, if your
students do need to learn the alphabet because it is very different from how their native
language is structured, you cannot skip this step. This makes learning the alphabet difficult
if you have a heterogeneous group of students. You can combat this obstacle by
differentiating your instruction, which requires more preparation but provides more
individualized instruction for your students. We will discuss differentiation in more detail in a
later module.

Letter-sound correlation: We will discuss this in more detail later in the module, butwhether
or not your students are familiar with the alphabet, learning the correlation between letters
(graphemes) and sounds (phonemes) is extremely important because sounds are unique
to a language. Many of these sounds and combinations of sounds will be difficult for your
students to get used to, so make sure you practice a lot.

Concepts of print: Some of the concepts of print we discuss here will be relevant to
students who come from different backgrounds, but some of these concepts will only be
relevant to students who are learning to read for the first time. It is possible to have a
student who knows a native language but has never learned to read. Your task is a little
more difficult in these cases because this adds another layer to what you need to
accomplish.

The English language is read from left to right.

The English language is read from top to bottom.

Letters and words convey messages.

When you get to the end of a line (on the right), you need to return to the beginning of the
next line (on the left).

The illustrations in a book correspond to the words written there.

Decoding: We will discuss decoding in much more detail in a future section, so we will only
briefly touch on it here. Once your students have built up their phonemic awareness, their
knowledge of the alphabet, and their letter/sound correlation, decoding helps them put
everything together to pronounce new words.
3.1.3 Advanced reading skills

Once your students have built up confidence with the basics of reading, your next step is to
help them develop proficiency in more advanced reading skills.

Summarizing: Summarizing is an extremely important skill because it helps your students

bridge the gap between understanding the words they are reading and understanding the
meaning that those words are trying to convey. The skill of summarizing requires students
to understand enough of what they have read to explain what the text is about in their own
words. To help your students learn how to do this, you may want to layer your summary
instruction, having them read text in English but allowing them to summarize it in their
native language. Eventually, though, you should move on to having the students
summarize in English. Scaffolding your instruction like this will definitely help your students
ease into true understanding of English texts.

Finding the main idea, important facts, and supporting details: While summarizing usually
requires a student to understand the main idea of a text, it is still important to discuss this
separately. Once students have summarized the text, you can ask questions that get to the
main idea, for example, “What is the point that the writer is trying to make?” Such questions
allow students to move from summarizing the entire text to pinpointing what is important.
The next step can be to ask follow-up questions, such as “How do you know that is the
point the writer is trying to make?” That requires a strong understanding of not only the
overall meaning of the words in a text but also how the different ideas in a text relate to one
another.

Sequencing: Sequencing asks students to take a step beyond summarizing the text.
Whereas summarizing the text concerns itself with simply understanding what happened,
sequencing requires students to label, categorize, and compartmentalize what happens in
the text. Students look at textual features to try to identify the important aspects of the text,
for example, the setting, the sequence of events, and the larger context of the text,
identifying how all of the parts of the text fit within the whole.

Relating background knowledge: It is always helpful when working with students who are
trying to learn a new language that you relate what they are learning to their background
knowledge. There are a couple of different ways that you can do this. As we mentioned
earlier, you can use cognates and your students’ native phonemes to help them
understand
English root words and sounds. Another way is to help your students connect thematically
to the text, asking them to try to relate what is going on in the text to personal experiences
they have had. While this won’t necessarily directly help them learn the language, it will
help them make a stronger connection with it and therefore make it more accessible.

3.1.4 Advanced reading skills

Making inferences: Once your students begin improving in their ability to understand
English text, the next step is to help them improve their ability to make inferences. Making
inferences means reading between the lines and accessing meaning that is not explicitly
stated. For example, if a man were to walk into the room, closing an umbrella, you would
infer that it was raining outside. No one specifically told you that it was raining, but you
were able to use context clues to draw that conclusion. Once students are more
comfortable understanding what they read, working on their inferential thinking will help
them learn how to see the meaning in a text that is not explicitly stated.

Drawing conclusions: This idea goes hand-in-hand with inferential thinking. To be able to
accurately draw a conclusion, a student needs to be able to understand the literal
meaning of a text and how that literal meaning can lead to a conclusion.

Comparing and contrasting: Comparingand contrasting is the next step along the line of
textual analysis. To compare and contrast two texts, a reader needs to understand the
purpose of the text as well as the strategies that a writer uses to convey meaning. This skill
can be extremely useful, as it easily lends itself to having students identify which text is
more effective.

Distinguishing between fact and opinion: As part of the evaluative process of reading,
distinguishing between what is fact and what is opinion can be an incredibly nuanced task.
It requires your students to really understand what the text is saying to evaluate whether
the text is based on opinion or fact. This can be difficult, especially when the text is
opinionated, with a speaker who presents his or her opinions as fact.
Self-questioning: As your students get more comfortable with reading texts on their own, it
is time to get them into the habit of reading actively. People tend to think of reading as a
passive activity because it is done quietly, but to really understand a text, you need to
constantly question what is going on. Having your students use annotations to express their
self-questioning will help them get into the habit of asking questions as they read. This is
also helpful because they can go back to text they have previously read and easily point out
the important information.

Problem solving: While problem solving is a cognitive skill, asking our students to solve
problems in English can be complicated even for students who are natural problem
solvers. Problem solving requires true comprehension, understanding beyond the explicit,
and the ability to think critically while working with a foreign language.

3.2 Auditory and visual discrimination

Both auditory and visual discrimination refer to our ability to perceive and distinguish
between different elements. The best way to understand these two concepts is by looking
at each one individually.

3.2.1 Auditory discrimination

Auditory discrimination refers to our brain’s ability to organize and categorize sounds,
thereby allowing us to make meaning of what we hear. While auditory refers to sounds and
reading is typically done silently, the ability to distinguish between different sounds
(phonemes) can affect our ability to sound out and identify vocabulary. The inability to
effectively access one’s auditory discrimination can impair someone’s reading
tremendously, especially when students are asked to read out loud. If someone has trouble
with auditory discrimination, they will have trouble:

Understanding phonemes and how they are different. This is especially true with
phonemes that are similar, as we can see in the words “forty” and “fourteen.” The subtle
changes in the structure of these words may be difficult for someone who has poor
auditory discrimination to perceive.
Learning to read. As we have already discussed, many of the early reading strategies
rely heavily on a student’s ability to understand and distinguish between different
sounds. This can add an extra hurdle for a new English language learner.

Sometimes, struggles with auditory discrimination can affect students’ ability to focus
on what they are reading because they have difficulty blocking out background noise.

Just because someone suffers from an auditory discrimination disorder, however, does not
mean they cannot learn a new language. Such a disorder simply provides a surmountable
obstacle on the path to success..

3.2.2 Visual discrimination

Visual discrimination refers to an individual’s ability to distinguish between letters, shapes,

numbers, and objects. While both are important, visual discrimination is much more
impactful on an individual’s ability to read than auditory discrimination. Auditory
discrimination affects an individual’s ability to sound out words, but visual discrimination
affects an individual’s ability to recognize which letters he or she is seeing. While it can be
difficult to identify when a student has a visual discrimination deficiency because it can
mask itself as just typical difficulties that students might have reading a new language, here
are some signs that you can look for:

The student has trouble identifying letters and learning the alphabet. The difficulty will be in
recognizing the letters rather than being unable to remember what they are called.

Difficulty telling the difference between similar letters (e.g., b and d), similar numbers (e.g.,
6 and 9), and/or similar shapes (e.g., circles and ovals).

Difficulty differentiating between words that have similar beginnings or endings.

Visual discrimination issues, just like auditory discrimination issues, can be overcome, but
reading is much more difficult for people with visual discrimination disorders. Here are some
potential classroom exercises that you can use to help students who struggle with visual
discrimination disorders or deficiencies.

Using visuals that are bright and colourful to help students work on distinguishing between
clear shapes and colours.

Using digital tools such as a laptop or tablet that can help make working on visual
discrimination fun for the students.

Make learning about visual discrimination fun by using games or puzzles that require the
student to differentiate shapes or letters.

3.3 Forming associations

Very early on in the process of learning to read, students need to learn to form associations
between sounds (phonemes) and letters/words. This process is paramount to a student
understanding how English speakers turn sounds into words and how English words
convey meaning. Regardless of the age of your students or their native language, you will
need to help them learn typical English letter/sound associations. Here are the basic
principles behind teaching a student how to form strong letter/sound associations:

Assessment: Every student is different, and you don’t want to assume that all of your
students are in the same place. Some students are coming to the English language with a
native language that shares many of the same sounds, while others could be coming from
a native language that uses none of the same sounds as English. By properly and
consistently assessing the letter/word association abilities of your students, you can tailor
your lesson planning to directly target deficiencies and differentiate your instruction to
address all skill levels.

Sequential and systematic instruction: While pedagogy often dictates that you let students
guide their own learning, a skill like this needs to be taught systematically and sequentially.
In many ways, basic skills like these work best with old-school instruction, which means
you teach a concept, assess for that concept, teach another concept, assess for both
concepts,
and continue with this process. Continually build on the skills and knowledge that your
students are attaining, and keep returning to the basics to make sure they don’t forget
them.

Teach explicitly: Sometimes, it can be cool to lead a student to meaning without the student
really knowing where the lessons are going. When teaching letter/sound associations,
though, it is important to be explicit about your teaching. That means you are clear with
your students about what you are teaching them, what they are learning, and why they are
learning it. The more you get the student to accept the process, the more success you will
have.

Do not focus just on reading: Learning letter/sound associations is not just a reading skill; it
is multisensory. Therefore, you should treat your instruction of the skill as a multisensory
skill. Use whatever resources you have available to help students make the necessary
associations. Use flashcards, pictures, digital games, and any other modes of learning you
can think of to get the job done. In this way, you will help your students in more than just
their reading.

3.4 Decoding

Once you have helped your students form strong associations between letters and sounds,
the next step is to work on decoding, which refers to displaying those associations by
rapidly turning the written word into speech. This is an essential part of language and is
most easily displayed when your students read aloud.

3.4.1 Common questions about decoding

Why is decoding important?

Decoding is important because it is the basis for most reading comprehension skills. An
inability to decode words leads to an inability to identify and understand vocabulary, a
difficulty building fluency, and difficulty with overall reading comprehension.

How can you tell if a student is struggling with decoding?

Students who are having trouble decoding often believe they are stuck or that reading is
something they just don’t do well. Here are some of the symptoms to look out for to
identify students who are struggling with decoding:

The student feels stuck when they need to read a lot of words because they cannot focus
enough on any one word. This is common and manifests in students who can decode
single words when they are presented but have difficulty decoding those same words if
there are too many words at once or the words are coming at them in quick succession.

Students spend so much energy trying to decode the words they are reading and say
them properly that they are not comprehending what they read. In these cases, students
might not seem to be struggling too much when they are reading (though they would not
show complete fluency), but they would not have much of an idea what they read when
questioned.

The student complains that he or she simply “does not know” how to sound out words.
This is usually a sign of frustration at the energy it is taking for them to decode the words
that are being presented to them.

The student can identify letters and sounds and even the relationship between the two
but struggles putting them all together in a short amount of time.

Remember that these observations can reflect anything from a student struggling a little
with a new skill to a student having a learning disability that is inhibiting his or her ability to
decode words.

3.4.2 Common questions about decoding

How do I teach decoding to my students?

Here are some simple ways that you can help your students improve their decoding skills in
your classroom:

When you are teaching a sound, use visuals to prompt the students to reinforce their
knowledge of sounds, and ask the students to say the sound out loud as practice. This will
help the students improve the speed at which they can decode and also stimulate more of
their senses as they learn, making it more memorable and effective.

Use phonics to drill the students and give them more and more practice with sounding
out phonemes and building to sounding out words.

Use relevant reading and writing assignments that relate to what you are teaching. If you
are teaching the students a particular sound, find a written piece that really highlights that
sound so that the students can practice it in a practical manner.

Don’t be afraid to use methods that will ask students to use their hands. Using
manipulatives is a great way to help students learn on a higher level and ensure that the
information you are teaching makes its way to the students’ long-term memory.

Try grouping your student homogeneously so that you can address specific problems or
struggles in pockets of students and make your job a little easier. This leads to more
individualized instruction and ensures that all of your students are growing and not that the
children who understand the material are constantly waiting around for the others to catch
up.

3.5 Reading for purpose

Now that your students have learned and mastered the basics of reading, it is time to move
towards higher-level thinking, which means reading for purpose. Up until this point, the
purpose for reading was comprehension, but there is so much more to being a strong
reader. Strong readers do not just understand the literal meaning of what they are reading;
they also understand the implicit meaning of what they read. Let’s take a look at some
simple strategies that will help your students read with purpose more effectively.
Teach your students to be reflective about their own reading. Reading is an active
skill, not just a passive occurrence. If a child loves playing basketball, he cannot
expect to just sit on the court and let basketball happen; he needs to try. The same
principle applies to reading. Encourage your students to be aware of their reading,
what works for them, what helps them, and then to have the follow-through to do
what they need to do to read more effectively.

Make sure that your students understand the purpose for which they are reading
something. If you take a passage completely out of context, it is not going to make much
sense, so give your students some context whenever you give them something to read. Ask
them to look for something specific, give them guiding questions, or even just let them know
why the piece is relevant to the curriculum.

Invite the students in on the process of setting a purpose. Encourage them to question the
text and really delve into it to get meaning. Then encourage them to identify their own
purpose (with proper guidance, of course). When students have a role in the planning
process, they tend to be more invested in lessons.

Model active reading for your students. So many teachers like to tell their students to
annotate a piece but don’t like to show them what that means. A good way to do this is to
take the first section of whatever you are going to have them read and go over it as a class.
As you go, show them how you would annotate the piece, what kinds of questions you
would ask, and when you would underline or highlight words, phrases, or sentences. This
will help them visualize what they are supposed to do.

If you are able to take a student who does not know English from sounding out letters to
reading actively and fluently, you’ll know you have been successful.

Module 4: Writing

Whereas reading serves as the basis for students understanding a new language, writing
gives them the opportunity to explore the new language. Now that your students are able
to comprehend the English language as they read it, it is time to put them in charge of
using that language to convey their meaning. Learning to write in a new language can be
very challenging because you need to have the same base of knowledge as you would for
reading to comprehend the words, and you also have to be able to create those words to
represent your thoughts and ideas. In this module, we will discuss the basics of writing in
English, including how to craft a sentence, how to make words work together, and how to
explore the language through writing.

Module 4: Writing

4.1 Sentence structure

4.2 Grammar

4.3 Informative and explanatory writing

4.4 Persuasive writing

4.1 Sentence structure

In your studies of reading and comprehension, your students have developed some
basic skills in understanding the language as they come across it. Now that they have a
basic understanding of English sounds and words, it is time to help them learn how to put
those sounds and words together to create sentences that convey meaning. We will start
at the beginning and look at how sentences are structured in the English language.

4.1.1 Basic sentence patterns

There are five basic patterns for sentence structure in English, and they differ in the
elements that are present within the sentence. Any two sentences, however, no matter how
different they are, contain two things: a subject and a verb. For a sentence to work, there
needs to be a person or thing that is doing or being something (subject) and an action or
state of being that they are committing or portraying (verb). Here are the five basic
sentence patterns that your students will encounter in the English language:

Subject-verb (S-V): This is the simplest sentence pattern in the English language,
containing only the information that needs to be there. Here are a few examples of
sentences that follow the subject-verb pattern:

Mark ran.

Maria slept.

The dog

plays. Jimmy

fell.
Subject-verb-object (S-V-O): Sentences that follow this pattern are very similar to S-V
sentences except that an object has been added to the sentence. In an English
sentence, the object is what is being acted upon by the subject. In other words, the
noun (subject) is acting (verb) upon another noun (object). Here are a few examples
of sentences that follow the subject-verb-object pattern:

Mark ran to the store

Maria slept in bed.

The dog plays outside.

Jimmy fell to the floor.

4.1.2 Basic sentence patterns

Subject-verb-adjective (S-V-Adj): This sentence pattern is similar to S-V-O except that the
object is not a noun; it is an adjective. Since an object must be a noun or an entity that is
being acted upon, when the verb acts as a state of being to set up a description of the
subject, you get an S-V-Adj sentence. Here are a few examples of sentences that follow
the subject-verb-adjective pattern:

Mark is hungry.

Maria was tired.

The dog looks playful.

Jimmy seems

clumsy.

Subject-verb-adverb (S-V-Adv): To the untrained eye, this sentence pattern is the

same as the previous one, S-V-Adj. The difference between that pattern and this
pattern, however, is that while that structure saw the object turning into an adjective,
this one sees it turning into an adverb. In other words, the verb no longer acts as a
state of being to set up a description of the subject, but rather the words following the
verb act as modifiers to the verb. Here are a few examples of sentences that follow the
subject-verb-adverb pattern:

Mark ran quickly.

Maria slept peacefully.

The dog plays loudly.

Jimmy fell
disastrously.
Subject-verb-noun (S-V-N): As you already know, the object of a pattern has to be a
noun. Just because there is a noun following the verb, however, does not mean that it
is the object of the sentence. In this sentence structure, the noun is not the object
because, as with S-V- Adj, the words following the verb describe the subject. Here are
a few examples of sentences that follow the subject-verb pattern:

Mark is the store owner.

Maria is a doctor.

The dog was a corgi.

Jimmy became a

lawyer.

4.1.3 Clauses

Looking at the examples in the previous section, you may wonder what happens when
sentences get more complex. That can certainly complicate things, but at its core a
sentence still follows one of the previous patterns (or two of them if it is a complex
sentence). Understanding the typical sentence patterns is helpful, but your students also
need to understand the basic structures that dictate sentences in English. To understand
these basic sentence structures, though, we need to first discuss clauses.

Clause: A clause is one of the basic units in English grammar and is a group of words that
contains a subject and a verb. Every sentence has at least one clause in it (because the
requirements for a sentence and a clause are the same). A clause, however, does not
necessarily complete a thought and therefore work alone as a sentence. There are two
types of clauses, and understanding both of them is important for students who are
learning to write in English for the first time.

Dependent clause (subordinating clause): This is exactly what it sounds like: a clause (or
group of words containing a subject and a verb) that is dependent on other clauses. In other
words, a dependent clause would not work alone as a sentence because it needs another
clause for it to make sense. An example of a dependent clause is “because the world is
ending.” The only thing that makes this clause dependent is the word “because,” which
adds the implication of cause and effect to the sentence. We see the cause, but we need
the effect to complete the sentence.

Independent clause: An independent clause is a clause (group of words containing a

subject and a verb) that can exist by itself and be a complete thought and therefore
complete sentence. Every sentence contains an independent clause, and all simple
sentences are made up of one independent clause. An example of an independent clause
is “They went down to the bomb shelter.” The absence of subordinating word (“because” in
the dependent clause) makes this sentence work as a complete thought.
If we combine the two clauses, one dependent and one independent, in the previous
example, we get a complex sentence, which looks like this: “Because the world is ending,
they went down to the bomb shelter.” This is a complete sentence, with a dependent
clause (“Because the world is ending”) marked by a subordinating word (“Because”)
presenting a cause and an independent clause (“they went down to the bomb shelter”)
completing the thought with the effect.

4.1.4 Basic sentence structure:

With dependent and independent clauses under our belts, we can turn our attention back
to sentence structure and look closely at how these clauses can work together to create
and convey meaning.

Simple sentence: A simple sentence contains one independent clause that stands alone as
a complete thought. This is the most basic type of sentence and creates the structure for
more complex sentences. Here is an example of a sentence that follows the simple
sentence structure:

Bobby drove his car to the store.

Compound sentence: A compound sentence is a sentence that contains two or more

independent clauses. These clauses could stand alone if they needed to but have been
combined because they are related to each other. Here is an example of a sentence that
follows the compound sentence structure:

Bobby drove his car and Mark read the directions

Complex sentence: A complex sentence includes an independent clause and one or

more dependent clauses. This means that within the sentence are subject-verb pairs that
would not be able to stand alone as a complete thought. Here is an example of a
sentence that follows the complex sentence structure:

Bobby drove his car to the store to buy gum.

In this example, we have borrowed the simple sentence and added a dependent clause
“to buy gum.” The subject (“Bobby”) is implied by the independent clause, and this
dependent clause cannot stand alone and make sense.

Compound-complex sentence: A compound-complex sentence includes at least

two independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses, essentially
combining the elements of a compound sentence with the elements of a complex
sentence. Here is an example of a sentence that follows the compound-complex
sentence structure:

Bobby drove his car and Mark read the directions when they went to the store.
4.2 Grammar

Understanding sentence structure is a key aspect of grammar, but there are many other
grammatical rules that are important for your students to know and understand. As you
may already know, grammar is the set of rules for the English language. While we do not
have the time to discuss every grammar rule in this section, we will cover the basics and
make sure that your students have a good basis of knowledge from which to work, and that
they understand how to create sentences that are grammatically correct and convey the
meaning they are intending. We have already discussed the parts of speech in a previous
module, but now we will look at those parts of speech in more detail and discuss some of
the rules regarding how to use them.

4.2.1 Nouns (1 of 3)

As we discussed in an earlier module, a noun is a person, place, thing, or idea. Here are
some different types of nouns:

Proper nouns: The names of specific places, people, or

things. Common nouns: General or colloquial names.

Concrete nouns: People, places, or things that are

tangible. Abstract nouns: Ideas that are intangible.

Nouns can be tricky because the term encompasses many different types of words. When
using nouns, one of the grammatical rules you need to look out for most is whether or not
you should pluralize a noun and how to do so.

When does a noun get pluralized?

Not every noun has a plural form because it does not always make sense for there to be
more than one of something. Count nouns refer to nouns that can be counted, such as
“cup,” “table,” and “monkey.” These nouns represent a specific object that there can be
more than one of. Non-count nouns are nouns that cannot be counted because they
already represent a group of objects or a type of object. For example, “water” is a non-count
noun because you cannot look at the ocean and count the water.

4.2.2 Nouns (2 of 3)

How do I pluralize a noun?

The rrules for pluralizing a noun are fairly simple, but since there are many nouns that do
not fit into any of these rules, the task of pluralizing can be taxing. Here is a basic rundown
of the general rules:

Most nouns are made plural simply by adding and “s.”

Cup - Cups

Egg - Eggs

Joke - Jokes

Mask –

Masks

Nouns ending in “ch,” “x,” “s,” or sounds require an addition of “es” at

the end. Bench - Benches

Box - Boxes

Class –

Classes

Nouns ending in “f” or “fe” require you to change the “f” or “fe” to a “v,” and add an “es.”

Calf - Calves

Half - Halves

Knife –

Knives

Some nouns do not follow any rules for pluralizing, and your students will simply have to
learn them.
Child - Children
Mouse - Mice

Woman –

Women

Some count nouns are the same whether they are singular or

plural. Moose - Moose

Deer - Deer

Species -

Species

4.2.3 Nouns (3 of 3)

Possessive nouns: Because nouns represent people, places, things, and ideas, they
sometimes need to be possessive to show that the person, place, thing, or idea owns or is
in possession of something. Possession is usually marked by an apostrophe (’) and follows
these rules:

You can make most nouns possessive simply by adding an apostrophe and then an “s” at
the end of the word.

Mark –

Mark’s Dog –

dog’s Boy –

boy’s

When you come across a plural noun that ends in “s” or a noun that already ends in “s,” you
can make it possessive by simply adding an apostrophe.

Boys – boys’

Class – class’

Dogs – dogs’

If you have one item, but you would like to express that two different people or things own
it, you would add an apostrophe and an “s” after the last person’s name.

Bill and Frank’s new

house Boxer and Spot’s

toy

Sally and Ann’s car.

If the objects owned by two different people are separate things, then you should add
an apostrophe and an “s” at the end of each name.
Bobby’s and Mary’s wedding rings are gold.

Jill’s and Samantha’s jobs are difficult.

Jean’s and Yancy’s tables are both oak.

4.2.4 Pronouns and antecedents

Pronouns are important in writing because they take the place of a noun to make the
writing less repetitive and choppy. To illustrate this idea, take a look at an example of a
written excerpt that does not use pronouns:

Mike grabbed Mike’s shirt and went to find Mike’s mom to tell Mike’s mom that Mike’s
mom needed to leave right away because Mike and Mike’s Mom were in danger.

Now, let’s use pronouns:

Mike grabbed his shirt and went to find his mom to tell her that they needed to leave right
away because they were in danger.

Clearly, the second example sounds much better and gets the point across without reusing
the original nouns.

The major point that your students need to understand about pronouns besides the
different types that exist (which we will discuss in this section) is that every pronoun needs
an antecedent or a noun that it is taking the place of. The only exception is indefinite
pronouns, which replace vague nouns, such as “all” or “some.”

Look again at the second example above, which contains pronouns. Each of those
pronouns has an antecedent, which you can see in the first example. Let’s rewrite the
second example, but this time we will include the antecedent to each pronoun in
parentheses:

Mike grabbed his (Mike’s) shirt and went to go find his (Mike’s) mom to tell her (Mike’s
mom) that they (Mike and Mike’s mom) needed to leave right away because they (Mike
and Mike’s mom) were in danger.

When a pronoun does not have a clear antecedent, the writing becomes very confusing,
and it should distinguish who is doing what. Here is an example of a sentence with
unclear antecedents. Note how difficult it is to understand who the sentence is truly
talking about:

Mark, John, and Billy went to the mall because he needed a new shirt. When they arrived, he
ran to the clothing store, and he ran after him, trying to keep up, while he hung back and
headed to the food court.

Because the antecedents are unclear, you could not tell me which boy went to the
store, which boy chased after him, and which boy went to the food court.

ebsite function

4.2.5 Types of pronouns

People often have trouble understanding the different types of pronouns, so your
students may have trouble with it as well. Let’s look at the nine different types of
pronouns:

Personal: A personal pronoun is a pronoun that refers to a person. This is the most
common type of pronoun, and for it to work in a sentence, it needs to have a clear
antecedent that it agrees with (male nouns need male pronouns). Examples: “I,” “he,” “she,”
“me.”

Possessive: Possessive pronouns are personal pronouns that convey ownership. These
pronouns not only need an antecedent but also need to be followed by a noun (the thing
that is possessed by the pronoun). Examples: “my carrots,” “his book,” “their time.”

Indefinite: Indefinite pronouns can be a little complicated because they take the place of
nouns that are not exactly clear. In other words, these pronouns will not have a clear
antecedent. It is important to note, however, that if these types of pronouns are used to
show possession, they are actually adjectives. Examples: “Everybody wants to go to
the mall,” “Somebody took my juice.”

Reflexive: Reflexive pronouns usually occur at the end of a sentence or clause and reflect
back to the subject of the sentence. Examples: “I am going to get a soda for myself,” “What
do you have to say for yourselves?”

Reciprocal: A reciprocal is exactly like a reflexive pronoun except that they refer to two
subjects doing something to or for each other. The only two reciprocal pronouns in the
English language are “each other” and “one another.” Examples: “John and Tim are in the
library quizzing each other,” “Maria and Jenny are helping one another with laundry.”

Intensive: Intensive pronouns are exactly the same as reflexive pronouns except they can
be removed from a sentence without changing the meaning or rendering the sentence
incomplete. Examples: “He is going to do the work himself.”

Interrogative: Interrogative pronouns are pronouns that are used in a question. Examples:
“Who took the candy?,” “Which door is it?”
Relative: A relative pronoun is a pronoun that connects a phrase or a clause to a pronoun
or a noun. Examples: “I am going to get whoever stole my bag,” “I am going to take
whichever door leads to the bathroom.”

Demonstrative: Demonstrative pronouns take the place of specific nouns and are
typically used when the speaker or narrator is talking about a specific object. Examples:
“This is the Captain’s wine,” “That candy belongs to her.”

4.2.6 Verbs

Along with nouns, verbs are part of the two most important parts of a sentence, so it is
important that your students know how to use them and the rules that govern English
verbs. Verbs are extremely complicated because there are so many different little rules
governing how verbs are used, but they can be generally broken down into three
categories: transitive, intransitive, and linking. We will look at each of these types to help
your students have a sense of how verbs work.

Transitive verbs: A transitive verb is a verb that exists in a sentence with an object. The
subject of the sentence is doing something to something else.

Brian hit the ball, and ran to first.

Both “hit” and “ran” are transitive in this sentence because they have objects. In the first
clause, it is clear that the ball (object) has been hit (transitive verb). In the second clause, it
is clear that first base (object) is being run to (transitive verb).

Intransitive verbs: An intransitive verb is a verb that does not take an object and rather
describes an action or state of being that is not acting upon something else.

Because the food was not free, she left.

While she is leaving whatever place she is in, the object does not need to be expressed
because the intransitive verb “left” is enough to describe the action.

Linking verbs: These verbs link the subject to the rest of the sentence when the verb is not
describing something being acted upon.

These avocados seem like they have not ripened yet.

The subject of the sentence (these avocados) is not acting upon anything else, so “seem”
is a linking verb, describing their relationship to the rest of the sentence.

4.4 Informative and explanatory writing

Now that your students have a decent handle on sentence structure and grammar, it is time
to learn how to write to convey meaning. In the next two sections, we will explore the most
common types of writing they will come across in their lives. First, we will start with
informative and explanatory writing, an extremely helpful tool for individuals in a number of
different professions.

Informative and explanatory writing involves researching or analyzing a topic that is already
generally accepted to be true. Unlike persuasive writing, there is no argument but rather an
exploration of why or how something is what it is. This is why informative and explanatory
is the most common type of writing that your students will find in their careers; more
careers are focused on explaining and exploring the nature of things rather than creating
an argument. To illustrate this point, here is a brief list of the different applications for
informative and explanatory writing:

Definition: In this type of writing, your students will have to define a topic and explain it in
detail. Potential practical application: Your student works in an office, and the sales team is
going to try to land a new client that works with industrial refrigeration parts. The boss asks
your student to provide a report on industrial refrigeration parts so that the sales team is
prepared when they pitch the client.

Breaking something parts: In this type of writing, your student will have a topic that is
generally understood but needs to be understood in more detail. To do this, he or she can
break it into parts and/or types to make it more palatable for the reader. Potential practical
application: Your student works for a team that is in charge of creating new programs and
projects for their company. The project team comes up with an idea they need to pitch to
their boss. Your student is tasked with writing a breakdown of the project, e.g., detailing
what each department will be responsible for, how much it will cost, and how much revenue
it will generate.

Describing behavior or function: In this type of writing, your student will have to explore
how something behaves and/or functions. Potential practical application: Your student
works for a zoo that is going to receive a new animal in three weeks that they have never
accommodated before. Your student is asked to write a report on how the animal behaves
and what kind of accommodations it will need.

Explaining why: In this type of writing, your student will have to explore why a generally
held opinion or fact is true. Potential practical application: Your student works for a
museum that is about to have an exhibit on dinosaurs. Your student is tasked with writing
a report for why dinosaurs became extinct so that the museum can inform its guests.

4.5 Persuasive writing

While persuasive writing is generally less utilized in most careers than informative and
explanatory writing, it is still an extremely important genre that can help your students in
many different aspects of their life. From trying to convince your boss that you deserve a
raise to trying to convince your colleagues that a new idea will work, persuasive writing can
be very powerful. Unlike informative and explanatory writing, persuasive writing explores a
topic or an idea that is not already widely accepted and creates an argument for why it
should be. Rather than discuss the different types of persuasive writing, we will focus this
section on how to craft an argument by focusing on the most important aspects of an
argument.

Thesis: While experts will argue on where a thesis is most effective in a persuasive
argument, they will all agree that a thesis is important. A thesis statement is a short (one or
two sentences) summary of the writer’s position and serves as the main idea for the piece of
writing. A strong thesis statement provides the writing with a focus and gives the writer a
frame of reference for the rest of his or her argument.

Organization: An argument needs to be carefully organized to be as effective as possible.

This means that the writer needs to constantly think about the thesis and how the
argument is connecting back to it. Proper organization helps the argument flow and eases
the reader through the writer’s ideas.

Support: An argument is not complete without strong support. Whether the support comes
in the form of direct textual evidence, facts, or the opinions of respected professionals, it
gives the reader a reason to believe your claims. The support serves as an assurance to
your reader that you are not coming up with this argument off the top of your head, but
rather that there is evidence to support what you are trying to convince the audience to
believe.

Elaboration and Analysis: Your argument needs to explore the topic and why the support
you have provided is worthwhile and relates back to the thesis. Without proper elaboration
and analysis, your support will simply hang there limply and not be effective in convincing
your audience.

Conclusion: Your conclusion should come with a summation of the rest of the argument to
solidify your ideas in the readers’ heads as well as a call to action or a last attempt to
convince the audience to understand and/or believe your argument.

If your students can master these basic components of a strong argument, they will find it
much easier to be convincing whenever they are trying to persuade.

Module 5: Speaking

Reading and writing are extremely important in learning a language, but the real test is

speaking, where students will have to use everything they have learned up to this point to
quickly process information and speak in a language that is not native to them. In this
module, we will go into more detail about sounds and how they are formed in the English
language. We will also talk about how you can best help your students become fluent
speakers of English through reading out loud, responding to questions, and eventually
speaking about their own ideas. Once your students are able to master speaking the
language, they will be well on their way to achieving English fluency.

Module 5: Speaking

5.1 Sounding out words

5.2 Reading out loud

5.3 Responding to questions

5.4 Presenting new ideas

5.1 Sounding out words

Although we have already discussed sounds in the module on reading, here we will focus
more on how to help your students actually sound out words. We will start with a more
specific overview of phonetics.

5.1.1 Phonetic symbols

As you know from our earlier module on reading, phonetics is the study of sounds and
human speech. What we did not discuss earlier, however, is that phonetics has its own
language made up of all of the most common phonemes in the English language. While
your students do not need to know these phonetic symbols to be able to read or speak, it
can be helpful when you are trying to teach them how to pronounce English words. Here
is the basic rundown of phonetic symbols:

Consonants:

Symbol Examples

p pen, copy, happen

b back, baby, job

t tea, tight, button

d day, ladder, odd

k key, clock, school

g get, giggle, ghost

tʃ church, match, nature

dʒ judge, age, soldier

f fat, coffee, rough, photo

v view, heavy,

move thing,

author, path

s soon, cease,

sister Symbol Examples

z zero, music, roses,

buzz ʃ ship, sure, national

ʒ pleasure, vision

h hot, whole, ahead

m more, hammer,

sum

n nice, now, funny, sun

ŋ ring, anger, thanks,

sung L light, valley, feel

R right, wrong, sorry,

arrange j yet, use, beauty, few

w wet, one, when,

queen ʔ department,

football Vowels and

diphthongs:

Symbol Example

ɪ kit, bid, hymn, minute

e dress, bed, head, many

æ trap, bad

ɒ lot, odd, wash

ʌ strut, mud, love, blood

ʊ foot, good, put

iː fleece, sea, machine

eɪ face, day, break

aɪ price, high, try

ɔɪ choice, boy

uː goose, two, blue,

group əʊ goat, show, no

aʊ mouth, now

ɪə near, here, weary

eə square, fair, various

ɑː start, feather

ɔː thought, law, north,

war ʊə poor, jury, cure

ɜː nurse, stir, learn, refer

ə about, common,

standard i happy, radiate,

glorious

u you, influence, situation

ṇ suddenly, cotton

ḷ middle, metal

ˑ Stress mark

5.1.3 Articulatory phonetics

When your students understand the important phonetic symbols of the English language,
determining how to sound out new words will be much easier. What will also help them
learn how to sound out words is understanding how to make those sounds. Articulatory
phonetics is the study of how sounds are created, and a working understanding of the ideas
outlined in articulatory phonetics can really help your students understand the English
language.

Understanding the anatomy of speech

So many different parts of your mouth and throat are involved in the production of speech
that it can be overwhelming to try to trace sound. Let’s make it a little less overwhelming by
looking at each body part that contributes to speech.

Alveolar ridge: The gums just behind the upper teeth.

Palate: The hard palate, or the roof of the mouth within the sphere of your teeth.

Velum: The soft palate, or the roof of your mouth as it extends past the teeth, ending at the
uvula.

Uvula: The appendage that dangles in the back of your mouth before your mouth turns into
your throat.

Pharynx: The back of your throat, behind the uvula.

Epiglottis: A flap of flesh that rests below your pharynx, at the top of your throat.

Trachea: The windpipe, which is covered by the epiglottis.

All of these parts of your mouth and throat, including your tongue, lips, and teeth, work
together to modulate the sound waves that emanate from your throat. Without these parts,
we would only be able to make a one-toned indistinguishable noise rather than complex
and recognizable speech.

How do we make sounds?

Essentially, the sounds that we make are just puffs of air traveling through our throats and
out of our mouths. The sounds that these puffs of air make depend upon all the parts listed
above and how they block or change the air as it passes through. To illustrate this process,
think about the sound that would be made if you blew air through a tube. Now think of the
sounds you can make if you blow air through a flute, which blocks and moves the air in
specific ways. This is pretty much how your voice works.

Making consonant sounds

The difference between consonants and vowels is that consonants are made when there
is much more obstruction to the air as it is passing through your mouth, whereas your
mouth
generally remains open when pronouncing vowels. Consonant pronunciation can
generally be broken down into the following categories:

Stops: This is when you completely block the flow of air from your throat by closing
your mouth at some point during the pronunciation of the sound (p, t, k, b, d, and g).

Nasals: In a nasal sound, you close your mouth just as you would with a stop, but the back
of your velum lowers, which allows air to flow up through your nose and out of your nostrils
(m, n, ?).

Fricatives: In this sound, you only close your mouth part of the way so that air is forced
through a narrow passage and makes a hissing sound (F, , v, s, z, ?, ?, h).

Affricates: A combination of stop and fricative sounds that are made in a similar way (tS, dZ).

Approximants: This sound is like a fricative except that it involves less obstruction.
Sometimes, you will make these sounds by touching the tip of your tongue to the alveolar
ridge, lowering it as you release the air (l, r, j, w).

There is also such a thing as voiced consonants, which refer to consonant sounds that are
accompanied by vibrations in your throat as the air passes through.

Place of articulation

Consonant sounds can also be classified based on where in the vocal tract sound air gets
obstructed, which is known as the place of articulation. Here are the different terms for
where consonant sounds are articulated:

Bilabials: When you close or constrict your lips.

Labiodentals: When your upper teeth and lower lip meet as you speak.

Dentals: When you press the tip of your tongue to your upper teeth as you speak.

Alveolars: When you press the tip of your tongue to the roof of your mouth as you

speak. Post-alveolars: When you touch the tip of your tongue to your soft palate as you

speak. Palatals: When the body of your tongue touches your palate as you speak.

Velars: When the body of your tongue touches your velum as you

speak. Glottals: When you constrict your glottis as you speak.

Making vowel sounds

While vowel sounds still rely on opening and closing the mouth, we block the airflow from
our throat significantly less when pronouncing them. Many people have difficulty
explaining
the difference between a vowel and a consonant, so learning how each of them differs in
pronunciation can be helpful. Generally, different vowel sounds are made by different mouth
shapes and positions of the tongue.

5.2 Reading out loud

Reading out loud is not just a great way for your students to improve their spoken fluency;
it is also a great way to improve their overall comprehension. Let’s start off by looking at
the benefits of reading out loud.

5.2.1 Why read aloud?

Increased retention: Anytime that you can access more than one sense, you are more
likely to retain the information you are consuming. This is why the most memorable lessons
from school were the ones where you did an activity that required you to get out of your
seat and move around. Adding that extra wrinkle made it more memorable. When we read
out loud, we are not only reading, but we are also listening to what we read.

Increased focus: When you read to yourself, it is easy for your mind to wander and get
distracted by external forces. Reading out loud creates an atmosphere of reading and
requires you to focus on every word. That does not mean that your mind cannot wander,
so you still need to keep yourself honest, but it definitely cuts down on being distracted.

Self-correction: It is much easier to hear yourself pronouncing a word wrong when you say it
out loud. When you read a word silently, you don’t need to be able to pronounce it to
identify it. Reading out loud definitely helps you improve your speaking fluency because it
ensures that you know how to pronounce the words you are reading (or that you learn).
Self- correction is also important. If you are aware enough of the rules of English
pronunciation to realize when you have made a mistake and fix it, you are operating at a
high level of understanding.

Learn and practice intonation: As you read out loud, you can begin practicing intonation,
stressing the right syllables and delivering the lines the way they were meant to be
delivered. This is another indication of a deep understanding of the intricacies of the
language, since intonation is only implied and not explicitly detailed in a piece of writing.

5.2.2 Strategies for reading out loud in the classroom

There are a number of different ways that you can have your students read aloud to
practice their proficiency with the language. Some of these strategies ask students to read
in front of the class, some ask the student to read in front of a partner, and others ask the
student to read out loud only for himself or herself. Each strategy has its merits and
drawbacks, but reading out loud in any form will help your students improve their overall
fluency in English.
Round robin reading: With this strategy, you make a game out of reading out loud, and
students take turns reading a certain amount of text. This is a great way to get your
students comfortable with reading out loud, but it can be difficult to motivate struggling
students to read because of the stigma of reading in front of a group. This is also a great
strategy for getting everyone involved in reading together, but it can hinder students who
are stronger readers and have to wait for struggling readers to catch up.

Popcorn reading: Each student reads a certain amount of text out loud and then yells
“popcorn” and picks a new student to read. This can be a good way to make sure
everyone reads because the students are going to be better at keeping track of who has
read and who hasn’t than you would be, and it frees you up to monitor and/or provide
individual attention to struggling students.

Combat reading: This is similar to popcorn reading except the goal of the students is to
catch someone who is not paying attention. This can add a layer of fun to the activity, but
be careful presenting reading as a punishment. That is not the best way to nurture lifelong
readers.

Pick a name reading: This is the same as popcorn except instead of giving the students
the power to select the next reader you leave it to chance by using some variation of a hat
filled with everyone’s name.

Touch and go reading: The teacher is in control and touches a student on the shoulder
when they wants them to read.

Choral reading: The entire class, along with the teacher, read out loud together. This
strategy serves a number of different purposes. First, it helps take the stigma away from
struggling readers. Second, it gives you the opportunity to model correct pronunciations for
the students that is not combative or anxiety inducing. Third, all students are engaged at
the same time, which is a lofty goal for any teacher.

Partner up: Have your student pair up and share the reading, each taking turns reading a
certain amount of text out loud. This is a little more difficult for you to manage and monitor
than the whole class reading, but it can help students get a chance to read out loud in a
less stressful situation.

Heterogeneous pairing: This is the same as the previous strategy except that you
intentionally partner struggling readers with readers who are excelling. The idea is that the
excelling student can help the struggling reader bridge the gap. Critics note that this
strategy does not really help the strong student very much, as slowing down to adjust for
their partners might work against them.

Teacher modelling: The teacher reads aloud to the class to model pronunciation and
fluency. This can be an effective strategy because it helps the students see how the piece
should be
read as they follow along, but make sure you are closely monitoring for engagement, as it
is a type of lesson where it is easy for students to be inattentive.

Echoing: This is similar to the previous strategy except the students echo back whatever
the teacher reads, trying to match the pronunciation, inflection, and emotion. This can be a
great way to model for students while still holding them accountable in the classroom.

Reading buddy: Students prepare individually, each with a unique text, and then read
their piece to a buddy, trying their best to read it with no mistakes. Peers can offer
critiques and suggestions, and you can monitor many students at once.

Tape recorder: Students read into a tape recorder and play it back to themselves as they
follow along with the text. There are many different things you can do with this, such as
having the students try to get the perfect recording and then turn it in or have the students
swap recordings with a partner. This is a great way for your students to get an idea of what
they sound like, where they are struggling, and where they are excelling. This is also a
great way to help students get used to self-correcting.

5.3 Responding to questions

As with many topics within this course, responding to questions is not compartmentalized
to speaking, meaning it is something that can help students gain fluency in a number of
different ways, not just one. There are a couple of different ways that we can look at this
topic, and each one works on a different skill that will help build your students’ English
fluency.

5.3.1 Question and response

Here are the different ways that you can question your students and expect them to respond:

Read a question and write a response: This is one of the more typical ways that teachers
assess a student’s reading because it is easy to assess after the fact and requires each
student to do his or her own work. This strategy helps your students work on reading and
writing skills but does very little to build their speaking skills.

Listen to a question and write a response: This strategy is more rare because it requires
every student to work at the same pace, which is not always feasible in a classroom. We
will talk about such strategies in the next module when we discuss listening in much more
detail. Just like the previous strategy, this strategy does not do much to help students learn
to speak English more fluently.

Read a question and answer verbally: This strategy helps students improve both their
reading and speaking ability. It is a great strategy to use when students are just starting off
trying to speak English on their own because the question is written in front of them and
always available for reference. This is a great first step towards speaking English without
any
visual cues.

Listen to a question and answer verbally: This is the ultimate test of a student’s fluency.
Not only do they have to comprehend the question as they hear it (something we will
discuss in the next module on listening), but they also have to be able to formulate a
cogent response in English. If your students are able to accomplish this task, then they are
well on their way to English fluency.

5.3.2 Question-answer relationship

One of the best ways that you can help your students respond to questions verbally is by
helping them understand how to find the answers they need. This is a great skill to have no
matter what language you speak, but it is definitely something that can help a student who
is struggling with a new language. According to the question-answer relationship model,
there are four levels of questions, each with different expectations for where students
should draw their responses.

Understanding: The answer to the question being asked is right there in the text for the
student to find. These types of questions represent a lower level of thinking but are great
for getting practice in answering orally in English. The question requires the student to look
at the text for an answer, but the answer is fairly easy, and the student can focus on how
he or she is going to provide an answer in English.

Think, search, and find: These types of questions require a higher level of thinking because
they require students to make inferences and understand the subtext of the piece they are
reading. This is a great next step for the student who is starting to get the hang of
understanding questions and is ready for a greater challenge. With these types of
questions, the student needs to balance the higher-level comprehension skills he or she
has been developing with his or her ability to verbalize a response in English.

Connection: These types of questions require the student to think beyond what is in the
text and make a connection with the piece. This can be more difficult for English language
learners because they cannot rely on repeating what they see in the text. Rather, they have
to synthesize what they read and create an answer that is relevant to the piece but use
their own words. Students are not only showing high comprehension skills but also high
critical thinking skills, all while making sure to verbalize their response in a language with
which they are not yet comfortable.

Creating new knowledge: These types of questions require the student to go completely
beyond the text and synthesize something else. These questions are related to the text, but
you can answer them without having to read it. This is a great way to get your students
creating new meaning and making use of everything they have learned so far.

5.4 Presenting new ideas

The ultimate showcase of student improvement in spoken English is to present new ideas
of their own in this new language. As students build towards fluency, using texts and
responding to teacher questions are all great ways to develop their skills, but the true test
comes when they step away from source material and use what they have learned to
present new ideas. While the job of presenting these new ideas is ultimately up to them,
you can encourage and support them on their way to success.

Continue building vocabulary: There will never be a time when any student is done learning
words, and the best way to help your students present their own unique ideas is by giving
them the vocabulary toolbox they need to express those new ideas.

Provide a low-anxiety environment: Your student will be taking a risk by sharing new ideas
in a language they are not completely fluent in, so try to take as much of the anxiety out of
the situation as you can. Give them the space to work through what they are going to say
and then be encouraging when they are ready to go.

Give them time to practice: It might be helpful to bring back the reading strategy that we
discussed earlier and give them a recorder to record themselves and check their own
progress. Once students have progressed and are improving, it is important to give
them some control over the process and take responsibility for their performance.

Provide honest but encouraging feedback: Even outside of TESOL, simply saying “good
job” is no longer enough to encourage a student. Be specific, be honest, but be
encouraging. If certain students are struggling with something, let them know, but also tell
them know how it can be fixed and what needs to be done to get it better. Students
appreciate honesty as long as it is presented to them in a way that does not immediately
make them shut down and not want to try.

Listen to the student: The worst thing you can do after your student has done all that work
to present a new idea to you is not listen when they present their ideas. Of course, you
would never visibly ignore the students as they present, but it can be easy to lose focus on
exactly what the students are saying. When the presentation is over, be specific as to what
you liked about the student’s idea. Show the student that you care and that you are proud
of him and her. Even if the student struggled, just getting up and taking the risk was a big
leap, so leave the critique until some time has passed.

Module 6: Listening
Listening is extremely important in learning a language because most of your students are
learning the language to be able to verbally communicate. Helping your students speak in
English is great, but that will not help them in a conversation unless they can understand
what others are saying. Throughout your class, you will be easing your students into the
language by speaking slowly and giving them the chance to decode what you are trying to
say. Once they go out into the world, they will have to comprehend what people are saying
no matter how quickly they speak. In this module, we will discuss many of the strategies
that your students will need to become conversationally fluent in English, including how to
decode sounds, how to break down speech, and how to summarize ideas that others are
presenting to them.

Module 6: Listening

6.1 Repeating what you hear or transcribing

6.2 Paraphrase what you hear

6.3 Conversational English

6.4 Using what you hear to present new ideas

6.1 Repeating what you hear or transcribing

Asking your students to transcribe speech is a great way to get them used to understanding
what people are saying. It is also a great way for you to monitor how well they actually
understand speech as opposed to how much they tell you they understand. It is one thing to
be able to get a general idea of what someone is saying to you; it is another thing entirely to
be able to transcribe the speech word for word. In this section, we will focus on two different
types of transcription, both of which will help your students better understand the language.

6.1.1 Phonetic transcription

Phonetic transcription is a technique whereby an individual breaks down speech into

sounds and phonemes, and transcribes the speech in phonetic symbols, using the symbols
that we discussed in the previous module. We will not repeat the symbols, so feel free to go
back and review them. Instead, we will focus on what phonetic transcription looks like and
how it will benefit your students.

What does phonetic transcription look like?

Phonetic transcription can be a great way for your students to learn to decode sounds from
speech, but it is not a practical activity for them once they have mastered the language. It is
extremely helpful but can take time. Take a look at the following excerpt and what it would
look like in phonetic transcription:

Original text: Sometimes, phonetic transcription can be complicated, but once you get the
hang of it, it is actually quite easy. It will also help students get the hang of recognizing
sounds, which will make conversational English much easier.

6.1.2 Phonetic transcription

Now that you have seen what phonetic transcription can look like, let’s take a look at the
different types of phonetic transcription. Some will be helpful to your students and some
will not.

Systematic vs. impressionistic transcription

As an expert in phonetic symbols, if you were to listen to speech in another language, you
would generally be able to chart it out based on English phonetic symbols. Obviously, this
is not the best way to handle this since phonetic symbols are going to be different in every
language, but you are going to use the knowledge you have. A phonetics expert would
instead use a more universal group of phonetic symbols to transcribe the speech. This is
called impressionistic transcription because although this is still not perfect the transcriber
is charting out the sounds as best as he or she can without knowing the language. Later,
experts can take this impressionistic transcription and revise and modify it to more
accurately represent the speech. It would be much more difficult if the speech were charted
out using more specific English phonetic symbols.

Once experts are able to analyze the speech and get a sense for the sounds of the
particular language they are listening to, they are able to revise the transcription into a
much more accurate transcription. This is called a systematic transcription or a
transcription that more accurately reflects the phonetic structure of the language it is
breaking down.

As you may have already determined, a systematic transcription is more helpful for your
students, although it could be helpful to have them use their native language to analyze the
sounds in an English recording. However, you are more typically going to ask them to
create phonetic transcriptions that more accurately reflect the phonetic structure of the
English language to ensure they are learning.

6.1.3 Phonetic transcription

Simple vs. comparative transcription

Phonetic symbols, though explicitly stated, can be left up to some interpretation. Experts
will sometimes do what is called a simple transcription, which makes the phonetic
translation as easy to read as possible without worrying too much about everything being
perfect. This kind of shorthand is sometimes appreciated by experts since they often have
to go through massive amounts of text. While this may not be the best type to start your
students with because they may not be ready for such shorthand, it can be helpful once
they become good at transcribing. You should only allow them to take shortcuts once they
are doing it to save time, not to make the text easier to transcribe.
Comparative transcription is relevant when the sounds for different languages match, and
you are able to use a more vague phoneme to refer to the different versions of the
phoneme in different languages. This type of transcription is not very helpful for your
students.

Phonemic vs. allophonic transcription

Everything we have been discussing so far in this section has referred to phonemic
transcription, which refers to any transcription where you break down sounds into
phonemes. The other option you have with your transcription is to do an allophonic
transcription, which means breaking down the speech into allophones. If you remember
from previous modules, allophones are a phonic rather than phonemic way of breaking
down words.

6.1.4 Word-for-word transcription

When you would like to have your students practice with words rather than just sounds, you
should work with them on word transcriptions, which are exactly what they sound like.
Students listen to a person speaking (or a recording) and transcribe the speech as it is
spoken. Let’s go through the steps you should have your students take to transcribe
speech.

Select or provide a text that already has a transcription. There is no way to assess your
students unless you have an answer key. You can either hold onto the correct transcription
yourself to assess them or give it to them so that they can check their work and self-correct.
When they are working towards mastery, it is probably better to give them the transcription,
and when you are ready to assess their mastery, it is probably better to assess them
yourself.

Have the students listen to the speech once. If you are delivering the speech, read it
through once, instructing them not to write anything yet but only to listen. If the students
have a recording, instruct them to listen to it in their own once through before they do
anything.

Have your students transcribe the speech line by line. It would be more helpful if they have
a recording of the speech so that they are able to go back and listen again when they need
to. However, you may want to simply speak the text when your students have progressed
to the point where they are strong enough to handle it. Here are some tips that might help
them:

If you have the opportunity, use a digital recording so that it is easier for the students to go
back and forth and keep track of their progress.

Have the students write their transcriptions by hand to have a closer connection to the
words they are writing. Also, handwriting the transcriptions means they will not have access
to grammar and spelling software that will help them along the way but ultimately hurt their
learning.

Allow the students to use a dictionary whenever they need to. Not only will this provide a
reference piece to help them, but it will also give the students practice looking up words in
a
dictionary.

Do not limit the number of times your students can rewind or listen to parts of the
recording again. Even native English speakers would have trouble transcribing a piece
word for word without listening to it more than once.

Encourage your students to transcribe the piece word for word, but then look through their
transcription to fix errors in grammar and usage even when those errors were made by the
original speaker. This will give the students practice transcribing the piece and also give
them the opportunity to practice their revision skills and access their knowledge of grammar.

6.1.4 Word-for-word transcription

Have your students carefully check their answers (as we said before, they may be at
the point where you can assess them instead) against the correct transcription. Have
your students look at where they struggled and where they excelled, and try to
determine their strengths and weaknesses so that they can use the activity as a
learning experience.

Transcriptions are not something you can do every day since they are pretty exhaustive,
but you should try to do them every so often until your students have demonstrated
proficiency. Also make sure that you are using it as a learning experience and have your
students continually reflect on their performance to make sure that it is worthwhile.

How is transcribing text helpful?

As we have already discussed, transcribing text can be extremely helpful to your students
for the following reasons:

It helps students work on mastering the sounds of English. Students need to be able to get
used to understanding English only from sound, and this is a direct way to give them
practice with that.

It gives students practice writing the language, and if you ask them to fix any errors in their
own transcription and the original text, they have the opportunity to display their
knowledge of grammar and practice revising it.

Because this activity is meticulous, it forces students to really delve into the text and pay
attention to every detail rather than just summarizing what is being said.

This directly prepares students for conversational English, although it takes out the part
where they respond. This is the first step towards being able to hold a cogent
conversation in English.

This is a great way to give students the opportunity to work independently. They are able to
take the time to struggle with the language without fear of peer ridicule. Completing this
activity will also give them a sense of accomplishment that they probably would not get from
a more teacher-directed activity.

6.2 Paraphrase what you hear

People tend to think that paraphrasing someone is easier than quoting them directly, but
that just isn’t true. To effectively paraphrase, you need to understand what the person has
said enough to put their words into your own words. That is why this is a great skill for your
students to practice; it will test their ability to listen to someone speak, process the words,
and then rewrite them in their own words. In many ways, this task is much more difficult
than transcription. Since paraphrasing is such a difficult skill for your students to master,
let’s take a closer look at how you can help them develop their skills.

6.2.1 Teaching students to paraphrase

There are many different ways that you can teach your students to paraphrase
more effectively, and it is definitely an important skill to practice with them.

Start out slowly and informally. Have your students pair up (or get into small groups) and
practice paraphrasing. You can even have them start in their native language if you want to
practice the process. Give the students a simple question, such as “What did you do this
weekend?” Have the students interview each other and then try to paraphrase what their
partner tells them. This helps them work on both speaking and listening skills.

Do it with them. When you are starting to teach the skill and process of paraphrasing,
model the activity by participating in it with them. Start by asking a student a question and
then paraphrasing his or her answer for the class. Then do the same thing, but ask the
class to help you paraphrase. By initiating the process together, you will make your
students feel more comfortable, and you will show them how it should be done.

As you are modeling the process with the students, help them understand how
to paraphrase better by introducing four strategies they can use:

Reword: The student replaces words with synonyms whenever he or she can.

Rearrange: The student rearranges a sentence so that it sounds different but conveys the
same message. You will have to model this for them directly.

Accept: Let the students know they will not be able to change every word (nor should they),
so they need to learn to make decisions on what needs to be changed and what should
stay the same.

Recheck: Have the students read over the paraphrased version they have written and
evaluate it based on how accurate it is to the original message of the speech. If you have
the students working together, have the student who delivered the speech check the
student who paraphrased for accuracy. You can also use this as an assessment tool and
evaluate it
yourself.

6.2.2 Teaching students to paraphrase

Now that your students are getting a little more comfortable with paraphrasing, give them
text to work with. You can still have them in pairs, but this time have one student read the
text to the other (once again, also practicing reading and speaking skills), and have the
other student paraphrase. Keep the texts simple enough so that the focus of the activity is
on paraphrasing skills.

As the students seem to really get the hang of paraphrasing, ask them to do it in front of
the class. Bring a pair up to the front to showcase the activity the class has already been
working on. Let students in the audience critique the performances. Remember that this
step will only really work once the students are comfortable with the process.

If you really want to extend the assignment and challenge your students, take the next step
by giving them more and more complex texts. Even once they start to master the language,
this is a good skill to practice.

Paraphrasing is a great skill to practice even if there is no listening component. Students

can also learn a lot by reading a text silently and paraphrasing it. Remember that anything
that helps your students gain fluency in the English language is worth doing.

6.2.3 How paraphrasing helps students

We have already hinted at all the ways paraphrasing can help your students master
the English language, but we should take some time to explicitly review the benefits
of this activity.

When you use oral text for this activity, it helps your students improve their ability to listen
to and comprehend English. As we stated before, they need to be able to recognize the
sounds they are hearing, identify the meaning of what they are hearing, and then turn that
information into something new. Students need to be able to not only translate the
language but also what is actually being said to re-create it.

This activity also works on other skills even if they are not the focus. When you have your
students read a text to each other, you also practice all of the skills involved in reading out
loud, including decoding, pronunciation, and reading comprehension.

Learning how to paraphrase naturally will help your students when they begin developing
their conversational English. As they become more comfortable with the language, they
will need to be able to take in what people are saying, process it, and respond
appropriately.
While this activity does not require the students to respond appropriately, it definitely helps
them with the rest of the conversation.

If you choose to have your students paraphrase with written text, then it does not really
help them practice their listening skills, but it certainly would help them improve their
reading skills.

Paraphrasing text helps students make connections with their own knowledge. This
happens in a few different ways:

Students make connections to their native language or cognates that helps

them understand and relay the information that is given to them.

Students connect to what is being said on a personal level and are able to paraphrase the
speech because they feel personally invested in it.

The activity takes on a much more interesting and less monotonous feel because you are
no longer asking the students to simply echo back what they have heard; you are asking
them to comprehend and create something of their own with it.

6.3 Conversational English

The next step from having your students listen to someone speak and paraphrase their
words is to have them respond to the speech with an appropriate reaction. Whereas
paraphrasing requires your students to be able to take someone else’s speech and put it
into their own words, conversational English requires them to quickly comprehend what
someone says, decide how to respond, and then determine how to respond in English. The
immediacy of a conversation makes this one of the true tests of your students’ fluency and
what they have learned thus far. To ensure that your students are prepared for
conversational English, make sure they understand each of the following concepts (some
we have already discussed):

Verb conjugation: To effectively communicate during a conversation, your students will

need to know the basics of verb conjugation, especially when it refers to tense. The
difference between “I ran to the store” and “I run to the store” may only be a difference of
one letter, but it significantly changes the sentence. Students do not have to be experts at
this yet, but they should understand the basics so that they can participate in a conversation
without confusion.

Using pronouns properly: Pronoun use is very important in conversational usage, as it is a

typical (and grammatically correct) way to take shortcuts to meaning. It is important that
you help your students by stressing to them the importance of clear antecedents as well as
proper pronoun usage.

How conversational English varies from formal English: Your students may be fluent in
formal English, but if you haven’t discussed such words as “gonna” with them, they
might
find themselves very confused in a conversation. Few people speak with perfect English or
even scrutinize spoken English the same way that they scrutinize written English. While
you don’t need to teach your students all the slang that they might hear, it would be helpful
if you could give them some information on the slang words that have been generally
accepted in oral English.

Understanding English idioms: While these cultural sayings will not pop up in every
conversation that your students have in English, you should try to give them some
instruction in some of the idioms that are most commonly used. Since idioms are so
cultural, we will leave it to you to decide which are the most relevant in your region or
country.

How English differs from their language: This will require individualized instruction, but it
will be worth it. Try to provide extra practice and instruction with your students to help them
understand some of the specific differences in grammar and structure between English
and their native language. Students who speak Spanish, for example, will have to get used
to the fact that the adjective typically comes before the noun in English. With specialized
instructions in these nuances, you can help your students be prepared for things that are
most likely to trip them up during a conversation.

6.4 Using what you hear to present new ideas

The next important step to take with your students is to help them learn and/or practice
how to take what they are hearing and use it to present new ideas. While conversational
English is great because it requires your students to reply to speakers with appropriate
and cogent responses, it is time for them to start presenting ideas of their own. In this
section, we will discuss where this will come in handy as well as how to help them practice
this skill.

In a school or business setting, it will be very helpful for students to be able to synthesize
what they hear in English and generate new knowledge from it. This is extremely relevant
since most of your students are likely learning English so that they can attend an English-
speaking school or get/maintain a job where speaking English will help them advance. In a
classroom, students will have to be prepared to listen to English lectures and then do
something to synthesize the knowledge they have learned. In business, workers will have
to be prepared to listen to what their boss is telling them and then create something that fits
the requirements. You can help them practice this skill by giving them more assignments
and projects that mimic ones they would see in an English-speaking classroom or
workplace.

This skill will definitely improve their conversational English. Keeping this skill in mind,
students will be able to carry on a conversation that is give and take rather than simply
answering and responding to questions that are asked of them. You can help your students
practice this by extending your lessons in conversational English to account for this need.
If a student is creating something completely new, such as an invention, an innovation, or
an idea, then it would be very difficult for them to express their ideas if they only have the
ability to respond to questions in English. Students need the tools to extend the mastery of
the English language and speak about things they have not heard anyone else say. This
takes a great understanding of the basic framework of the language, which you have
hopefully provided.

Students need to be prepared to speak “off-the-cuff,” without a language safety net. To

truly demonstrate fluency and mastery of the English language, they need to be able to
improvise with the language and understand it much the same way that they
understand their native language. With the right amount of commitment from both you
and your students, you will be able to get them to this point. It will just take patience,
preparation, and follow-through.

Module 7: Pedagogy

Pedagogy refers to the art and science of teaching and any of the methods that teachers
use to teach their students. Pedagogy is truly both an art and a science because there are
infinite strategies you can learn to use to help your students, but there is also artistry
involved in how you implement those strategies. Since you may not be in the classroom
yet, we will focus on the science side of teaching and let you discover the artistry as you
begin working with your students. In this module, we will discuss the best ways to impart
information to your students and how to learn from your experiences and continue
improving throughout your career as an educator.

Module 7: Pedagogy

7.1 Exposition

7.2 Modelling

7.3 Know where you are going

7.4 Constructive criticism

7.1 Exposition

Pedagogy is such a complex topic that it could be its own course, so as we discuss the
theories that inform a teacher’s planning, implementation, and assessment, keep in mind
that we are giving an overview rather than a comprehensive study. Here are some of the
most well-known theories of education.

Considering that education in some form or another has existed since the dawn of man, it
is surprising to know there are so many different theories regarding the best way to provide
education for students. While many of these can work together to inspire teachers in their
planning and instruction, some of them directly contradict each other and have led to
debates within the profession. Here, we will cover a few of those theories and discuss
how they can inform your teaching.

7.1.1 Bloom’s taxonomy (1 of 2)

Benjamin Bloom studied learning and concluded that learning activities could be
categorized into six segments based on the level of thinking they require. He framed his
theory into the shape of a triangle with the lowest-level thinking at the bottom. He did this
because even though the lower-level thinking activities require less thinking, they provide
the base for higher-level thinking. He believed (as many do) that it is very hard to extend
your learning on a topic if you do not understand the topic itself. We will discuss each
category in reverse order, starting with what Bloom labeled as the lowest level of thinking.

Remember: At the base of this triangle, representing the lowest level of thinking, is any
activity that requires a student to recall facts and basic concepts. These types of
activities are extremely important in a student’s learning, since it is hard to take the next
step without first knowing the basic facts. Activities that require students to remember
include defining words, memorizing facts, listing things, and repeating information.

Understand: At the next level of thinking, teachers ask students to comprehend what they
are memorizing and repeating. For students to explore content in any way, they need to be
able to comprehend what they are studying. Activities that require students to explain ideas
or concepts include classifying, describing, discussing, and explaining information.

7.1.2 Bloom’s taxonomy (2 of 2)

Apply: Once students understand the information they are learning, they can take the next
step and apply what they have learned to new situations. This displays a higher level of
thinking because the student needs to understand the concept enough to apply it to
something different. For example, a student may be able to recite Romeo & Juliet, which
shows they can remember. They may comprehend the play enough to explain it, which
shows they can understand. Now, if they can take that comprehension of the play and use
it to understand Othello, they are applying their knowledge. Activities that require students
to apply their knowledge include implementing plans, solving problems, and demonstrating
knowledge.

Analyze: True analysis of a concept requires a student to have accomplished all of the
levels of thinking that come before it. To truly delve into a topic and analyze more than
what is explicitly stated, a student needs to understand it completely. When students
analyze, they draw connections between ideas and explore connotative and deep meaning.
Activities that require students to analyze include differentiating information, organizing
information, comparing and contrasting, and experimenting.

Evaluate: Simply the act of evaluating something does not necessarily require much thinking;
we are constantly judging things we may know nothing about. To make an accurate
judgment about something, however, you need to understand it completely. If you ask your
students if Americans were justified in fighting against the British in the American
Revolution, they will need to understand how the war began, why each side fought, and
then make a determination about the colonies’ justification. Activities that require students
to justify a stand or decision include appraisals, arguments, judgments, and critiques.

Create: According to Bloom, the highest level of thinking is when you ask your students to
synthesize what they have learned and create something new. The idea behind his
emphasis on this skill is that students need to be able to understand something completely
and have high skills to be able to now create something of their own that is related.
Activities that require students to synthesize their knowledge include designing,
assembling, constructing, and writing (something original).

7.1.3 Behaviorism (1 of 2)

Behaviorist theory is an idea that hinges completely on motivation and how teachers can
get students to succeed in the classroom. While many thinkers contributed to the formation
of behaviorism, the ideas can be easily summed up by the famous experiment conducted
by Ivan Pavlov, who proved that a dog could be conditioned to respond to a specific
stimulus that does not inherently cause that response. He did this by essentially ringing a
bell every time before he gave a dog food to the point where the dog began to salivate in
anticipation of food. After some conditioning with this model, he removed the original
stimulus and found that the dog continued to salivate at the sound of the bell even when it
was not followed by food. The dog had now been conditioned to feel hungry whenever he
heard the bell according to Pavlov.

To understand the educational theory, we first need to clear up a few phrases that are
often misunderstood. Since behaviorism depends heavily on response to a stimulus, the
following phrases refer to the manipulation of stimuli by an outsider (in our case, the
teacher):

Positive reinforcement: When an outsider rewards a desired behavior by providing a

desired stimulus. An example is giving a student a good grade for working hard on an
assignment.

Negative reinforcement: This is probably the most misunderstood term in behaviorism. The
word “negative” refers to removal, and the word “reinforcement” refers to a stimulus.
Therefore, negative reinforcement is when an outsider rewards a desired behavior by
removing an undesirable stimulus. An example would be rewarding a student for
good behavior by not yelling at him or her as you normally would.

Positive punishment: This is when an outsider presents the subject with an

undesirable stimulus as a consequence of doing something wrong or not doing
something right. An example would be giving a student an F for not doing his or her
work.
Negative punishment: This is when an outsider removes a desired stimulus from the
subject as a consequence of doing something wrong or not doing something right. An
example would be telling a student that he or she can no longer sit with friends because he
or she is misbehaving.

Pavlov’s experiment displayed classic conditioning, which refers to conditioning

involuntary behavior (a dog does not choose when to salivate). B.F. Skinner extended this
idea, referring to his ideas as operant conditioning, which refers to conditioning voluntary
actions through reinforcement and punishment.

7.1.4 Behaviorism (2 of

2) According to this

theory:

Learners are not really active in the learning process but rather passive participants who
are simply responding to stimuli.

Learners begin as a blank page, and behavior is only shaped when stimuli provide either
positive or negative reinforcement.

The more that a behavior is reinforced, whether negatively or positively, the more likely the
student is to repeat that behavior.

In the same way, the more that a behavior is punished, whether negatively or positively, the
less likely the student is to repeat that behavior.

In operant conditioning, B.F. Skinner tested the efficacy of different methods of

disbursements for reinforcement and punishments. In other words, how often do you need
to reinforce or punish behavior for it to have the most lasting effect on the subject?

Continuous reinforcement: This is when a subject is reinforced every time he or she

performs the desired behavior. Skinner found that this did not motivate subjects. They did
not work as hard, and when the reinforcement was removed, they quickly stopped
performing the desired behavior.

Fixed ratio reinforcement: This is when the subject is reinforced after a specific number
of times that he or she performs the desired behavior. Skinner found that subjects
worked harder with this method, and they were less likely to stop the desired behavior
after the reinforcement was removed. However, this still was not the most effective
method.

Fixed interval reinforcement: This is when a subject is reinforced after a designated amount
of time, provided the desired behavior has been performed at least once during that time.
Skinner found that the subjects worked moderately hard and were about as likely to stop
the behavior as the previous model after the reinforcement was removed.

Variable ratio reinforcement: This is when the subject is reinforced after a random number of
times performing the desired behavior. Skinner found that this method made subjects work
hard and take a long time to stop the behavior after the reinforcement was removed.

Variable interval reinforcement: This is when the subject is reinforced after a random
amount of time has elapsed, provided that the subject has performed the desired behavior
at least once during that time. Skinner found that this worked equally as well as the
previous model, with subjects working hard and taking a long time to stop the desired
behavior after the reinforcement was stopped.

7.1.5 Constructivism

Constructivism hinges on the idea that educators need to meet students wherever they are
(in terms of skills and knowledge) and help them build on previous knowledge. It is also a
theory that seeks to help students find their own way as they experience learning and come
to their own conclusions.

According to this theory:

The teacher takes a backseat and monitors students as they take control of their learning. A
traditional classroom is teacher centered, but a constructivist classroom is student
centered.

Students are actively involved in the lesson. Instead of passively accepting the work given
by the teacher and completing it to receive a grade, the student drives the lesson and
works towards a goal with the teacher’s guidance.

The class feels less like dictatorship, which is run solely by one person, and more like an
environment that is run by the entire class.

Teachers allow students to find their own answers rather than telling them what answers to
look for. Students are able to explore things in their own way and come to their own
conclusions instead of exploring things the way the teacher tells them to and coming to the
conclusions that the teacher wants them to come to.

Teachers encourage students to be autonomous, which means they encourage students

to be independent and motivated by their own goals and interests.

Many modern classrooms are moving towards this model or at least towards a model that
is similar, following the next theory we will discuss.

7.1.6 Student-centered learning

While constructivism was student centered, there is a movement in modern education for
a broader embrace of student-centered learning, even if it is not technically considered
constructivist. Since the ideas of student-centered learning have already been covered in
constructivism and by the clarity of the title, we will focus this section on how
theorists believe student-centered learning benefits students.

Research shows that student-centered learning works because a student’s potential for
learning relies heavily on what he or she already knows. This can affect what new
information is important to the student, how he or she processes new information, and how
he or she determines what is important. With student-centered learning, students are more
free and able to work at their own pace, starting at their ability level or base of knowledge.

One of the most important parts of learning is reflection; having students look back at
what they learned, how they learned it, and where they need to go from here. A less
teacher- centered environment allows students more opportunities for this type of
reflection on learning.

Students who are involved in student-centered learning have reportedly been more
motivated and satisfied by the school experience. This is because they are more likely to
feel satisfied with their work than if they were simply doing what the teacher told them to
do.

Student-centered learning is more open to differentiation, which allows all students with
developmental, cognitive, or other differences to progress. A teacher leading the class is
much more likely to need all of his or her students to reach a specific point at the end of the
lesson. Students working independently can set their own goals.

One of the biggest obstacles that teachers have to face is the student who is not engaged.
Studies have shown that asking students to move around, control their learning, and take
responsibility for their development leads to more motivation and progress than in
traditional classrooms.

7.2 Modeling

One of the best ways to help students understand new knowledge or grasp difficult skills
is through modeling and scaffolding, which both involve the teacher showing students how
things are done. Too often in education, teachers assume that students already know
exactly what they need to do. More often than not, this is just not true. Students will
always benefit from watching the teacher model a skill or an activity. Students are easily
influenced and will often look to the teacher for how to act, what to do, and how to
succeed. Here are some different ways that you can model for your students:

Model desired personal characteristics: It can be extremely beneficial to present yourself

as a role model for optimal behavior during a lesson. At any given time in your classroom,
you are asking students to be responsible, creative, diligent, thoughtful, and respectful (to
name a few). Students are much more likely to meet these expectations if they see you
meeting them as well.

Model a task: Let’s say you want to teach active reading and annotation strategies to your
students. You can do one of two things. You could tell the students exactly what they should
do and let them do it, or you could show them what they should do and help them work on
it. Select a piece of reading and read it with the class, annotating it in the same way that you
expect your students to annotate. This way there will be no confusion about what you are
expecting from them.

Model metacognitive thinking: When you are trying to help your students become better
thinkers and arrive at conclusions more efficiently and effectively, it can help to show them
how your thought process works. In math class, this works perfectly because you can walk
your students through the process of solving a problem. In language classes, you could
walk your students through how you would break down a word for proper pronunciation and
potential meaning.

Let the students do the modeling: Assess your students’ strengths and weaknesses, and
give them opportunities throughout the year or course to model their strengths to the class.
Not only will you be reinforcing their success and solidifying their mastery of the skill, but
you will also be letting students learn from other students.

In whatever way you choose to use modeling, you will make a significant impact on how
well your students understand the skill or knowledge that you are working on. Sometimes,
students just need to see how it is done and not just hear how it should be done to be
successful.

7.3 Know where you are going

Planning for instruction is not an aimless adventure where teachers decide what they are
going to do as they go; it takes a lot of forethought. To be effective as an educator, you will
have to understand what you are leading to on day one and categorically take steps to
prepare your students to reach your goal. To be an effective teacher, you absolutely have
to know where you are going, and if you want to have an impact on your students, you
should also let them know where you are going.

7.3.1 Planning for assessments (1 of 2)

Backwards planning is an educational strategy that helps teachers make sure that
everything they do leads to student assessment. It is a pretty simple idea, though it is fairly
difficult to execute perfectly. Here are the steps you need to take if you would like to
implement backwards planning.

You first need to decide exactly what you are trying to do with the unit that you are
planning. At the end of the unit, what are you hoping that your students will be able to do?
These are your unit objectives and should be created with care because everything you do
during the unit will have to work towards these objectives. When you are creating these
objectives,
focus on what the students will be able to do by the end of the unit rather than the
content you want to cover. Your ultimate goal is to lead your students to success, not to
get to a specific point in your curriculum.

Design an assessment that is in line with the objectives you have created. If your objectives
are an expression of what your students should be able to do by the end of your unit, then
your assessment needs to assess whether or not your students are able to do these things.
Think of it this way: if you bring your car to a mechanic’s shop and they tell you they will fix
your car, you will assess their success by whether or not your car is fixed when they are
done with it. If you say that your students will be able to do A, B, and C by the end of your
unit, you need to assess if they can do it.

Now that you have created objectives and designed an assessment, you need to determine
what your students will need to achieve your objectives. What skills do they need to
improve on? What knowledge do they need? What do they need to practice? What steps
do they need to take to get to the point where they can be successful on the assessment
and therefore fulfill your objectives?

7.3.2 Planning for assessments (2 of 2)

Design a unit’s worth of lesson plans to target the specific skills, knowledge, and areas that
you have already identified as necessary for your students to find success. The whole
planning process is recursive. Make objectives, make a tool for assessing whether or not
students have reached the objectives, identify what the students need to succeed on the
assessment, and design instructions that target the students’ needs.

After you have taken your students through the unit and graded the assessment, it is time
for you to reflect on your teaching. Your objectives were to help your students be able to do
A, B, and C. Were you successful? Did enough students succeed that you can move ahead
without worrying about their progress? If students did not succeed, what kept them from
succeeding? How can you do things differently the next time you implement the unit to
ensure that your students are more successful?

There are two ways in which the previous reflection can inform your teaching. First,
redesign your unit so that it more effectively helps students achieve your objectives. When
you teach the unit next year, you should have more success. Second, what skills did the
students miss in this unit that they will need in the next unit? Their performance in this unit
should inform your planning of the next unit. If most of your students did not get the skill
you were planning for them to hone, then it should now become one of your objectives for
the next unit. You cannot just write them off and hope for better results next year. You need
to make up for it with these students and then adjust your instruction so that it is more
effective next year.

7.4 Constructive criticism

The whole process we discussed in the previous section does not have to fall only on your
shoulders as the teacher. Great teachers make students part of the process, asking them
to reflect on their own learning and identify what kept them from being successful. To do
that, they need to receive honest and specific feedback from you on their performance.
Telling a student “good job” isn’t going to help them improve at all. They don’t even know
what they did well when you say something like that. Honesty is important, but it is also
important that you are sensitive to the fact that excessive criticism could simply demotivate
your students. Here are some tips for providing your students with constructive criticism:

First of all, you need to make sure that your expectations for student work are very clear to
them. If they properly understand what is expected, you can get a true picture of what they
are able to accomplish, and they don’t feel blindsided by your feedback. If you have the
opportunity, you may even want to provide your students with examples to show them what
a successful assessment looks like as opposed to an unsuccessful assessment.

When you are providing feedback, be specific. There is nothing more worthless than
vague, general feedback. You are already going to have to overcome the obstacle of
students not paying attention to your feedback; if you provide meaningless feedback, they
are even less likely to focus on it. This is important when you are giving feedback on what
they did well as much as it is when you are providing feedback on their weaknesses.

Try to balance your positive and negative feedback. Never provide just negative
feedback; there is always something good that you can say. While a student will still be
pretty upset getting overwhelmingly negative feedback, it will definitely help that you have
provided a silver lining so that they see that their work was not worthless.

Refer back to your instruction. If students are struggling with something you have not taught
in the unit, then it is something you will have to discuss with them; if it is something that you
have gone over, then you will probably have to go over it again. When the students are
struggling with something you haven’t taught, it may not be fair for you to punish them for it,
so instead provide them with encouraging feedback that identifies the weakness and
promises you’ll discuss as a class.

Require your students to do some sort of reflection activity that forces them to read
or review the feedback you have provided. If they do not receive the feedback, what
is it accomplishing?

Module 8: Lesson planning

As a teacher, lesson planning is extremely important because it helps you understand

where you are going, and it makes it easy to show the administration that you are following
the curriculum.

For the latter reason, lesson plans have become more and more formal in recent years, and
it is now more important than ever before to understand what goes into a lesson plan as
well as how your lesson plans further your objectives.

To this end, this module will review all of the components of a strong lesson plan and how
you can prepare your lessons in a way that will be most effective and beneficial for your
students.

Module 8: Lesson planning

8.1 Standards and objectives

8.2 Following a curriculum

8.3 Varying instruction

8.4 Teaching strategies

8.5 Meaningful assessments

8.1 Standards and objectives

Every time you create a lesson plan you need to create an objective and make sure that it
is aligned with a standard. We will first take some time to discuss standards, since they
should be the basis for all of your lesson plans.

8.1.1 Standards

Standards are a set of skills that students need to have by the time they leave your
classroom. These standards are not set by the teacher but rather accessed by the
teacher for use in their lesson plans. Depending on where you are teaching your
students, the skills that the standards require them to meet are going to be different. For
the sake of this module, we will focus on the general idea of standards and how they
should inform instruction. Let’s first look at the general skills that standards usually focus
on.

Reading literature: Reading literature standards cover all of the skills that are required to
effectively read a piece of literature, including poetry, short stories, novels, and plays.
These standards typically focus on literary analysis skills, since reading comprehension
skills are covered in the next standard.

Reading for information: Reading for information standards cover reading comprehension
skills that a student would need to read a piece of nonfiction, such as an article, a
biography, or an academic journal.

Writing: Writing standards cover all of the skills involved in writing, including narrative
writing, expository writing, persuasive writing, and informative writing. Many of the
standards within this category will likely focus on a student’s ability to make a claim,
support his or her claim,
and explain himself or herself thoroughly.

Speaking and listening: Speaking and listening standards focus on all of the skills that
students will need to present new ideas and attain information from spoken sources. These
standards are especially important during student presentations, class discussions, and
Socratic seminars.

Language: Language standards focus on the skills that students will need to develop their
understanding of language. As a TESOL teacher, these standards will be extremely
important, but they are also relevant to mainstream classes. These standards focus on
diction, grammar, usage, and other aspects of understanding a lesson.

8.1.2 Objectives

Once you have a clear understanding of the standards that you need to hit within a unit,
now it is time to start thinking about the learning objectives you are going to create.
Whereas standards tell you what your students need to achieve by the end of a unit or the
end of the school year, lesson objectives detail where you want your students to be at the
end of a lesson.

It is your job as a teacher to make sure that the lesson objectives you have throughout a
unit work towards helping your students master the skills outlined in the standards. Here
are some tips for writing effective lesson objectives.

The first question that you need to ask yourself is “What do I want my students to be able to
do by the end of the lesson?” These objectives should be focused on skills rather than
content and cover skills that the students are going to develop through the unit.

Once you have written lesson plans for your entire unit, you should review your learning
objectives to make sure they all build towards meeting the standards for the unit.

Lesson plans need to be clear and measurable. At the end of a lesson, you should be able
to look back on the lesson and identify how many of your students met the objectives with
accuracy.

Types of objectives

There are a few different types of objectives that you can frame your lesson plans
around, so let’s review each kind.

Cognitive objectives: Cognitive objectives refer to students enriching their knowledge,

demonstrating their knowledge, and practicing skills related to the knowledge they
are enriching. In cognitive objectives, students are expected to comprehend, apply,
and synthesize their knowledge.
Psychomotor objectives: Psychomotor objectives are less common in a mainstream
classroom, as they apply to dexterity and physical coordination. These types of objectives
are more common in early education and education for students who struggle with
coordination and dexterity (disabled students or students who have suffered an injury).

Attitudinal objectives: These objectives are rare as lesson objectives and more purposeful
when used as classroom objectives. Attitudinal objectives require students to behave in a
certain way, which is more likely a concern for the classroom all year rather than a concern
for a specific lesson.

There are rules and guidelines that govern your creation of lesson objectives, and while
they vary depending on where you are teaching, we will cover some of the universal ideas.
Remember that lesson objectives are the backbone of your entire lesson.

Learning objectives should be focused on observable activities: To identify whether or not

your students have achieved the objective you have set out for them, the objective needs
to be observable or something that you can measure through observation. This idea will
help you keep your objectives specific and attainable.

Learning objectives should be focused on student activities: Many teachers make the
mistake of thinking that lesson objectives should focus on what they hope to accomplish
during the lesson. This puts the focus on teaching rather than learning and does not really
ensure that the students understand the material but instead ensures that the teacher is
delivering the material. Teaching may occur, but learning may not. Your lesson objectives
should always be about what the students are going to accomplish.

Learning objectives should be focused on student outcomes: Another mistake that many
teachers make is to create a learning objective that simply describes what the students are
going to do during the lesson. This is not the purpose of an objective and only measures
whether or not the students have complied with the teacher’s directions. As a student, I can
comply with everything my teacher asks without reaching the true objective of improving a
skill or extending knowledge. There should be an outcome tied to each lesson objective.

Good lesson objectives:

Students will be able to make a judgment about the strength of a speaker’s

argument Students will be able to determine which text best portrays the culture of

the 1930s Bad lesson objectives:

Students will be able to write an essay

Students will be able to hear about World War II

8.2 Following a curriculum

Depending on where you end up teaching, you may have a say in the creation of the
curriculum, but it is more likely that you will not. Gone are the years where a curriculum
was just an amorphous general idea, and here to stay is a culture where most schools
have an extremely detailed and prescribed curriculum for each of their teachers to follow.
To truly understand how to follow a curriculum, we first need to look closely at the
components involved.

8.2.1 Curricular components

Standards: As we discussed earlier in this module, all planning should start with the
standards that you want your students to be able to achieve during the curriculum.

Essential questions: Whereas the standards are focused on what the students are going to
be able to achieve or work on during a unit, the essential question is the thematic question
that the students should be exploring throughout the unit. For example, you may decide
that you want your students to work on a standard that focuses on using two informational
texts to draw conclusions. You may want to design a unit that covers World War II and
ends with a discussion of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You can have an
essential question that asks something such as “Should there be rules in times of war?”
Then your students could explore two nonfiction texts to draw conclusions about America’s
decision to drop atomic bombs to inform their understanding of the essential question.

Assessments: As we discussed before, the summative assessment for the unit should
assess how well the students fulfilled the standards and objectives of the unit. However, a
detailed curriculum will also include formative assessments that help your students build
skills and scaffold on their way to the summative assessment.

Model lessons: A thorough curriculum will also provide you with exemplar lesson plans that
you can either use, modify, or look to for guidance on how you should be framing your
lessons.

Exemplar texts: Your curriculum will likely also detail the texts that you can use for each
unit. These will be texts that are vetted to make sure they fit the unit thematically and are
within the appropriate reading level for the students in your class.

Secondary material: Your curriculum should also offer secondary sources that fit within
your units. In an American English unit plan, there are typically suggestions of art and
music to go along with the literature that needs to be covered.

8.2.2 Teaching to the curriculum

Although many school systems have adopted standard curriculums that do not budge very
much, research shows that the best model for curriculum is a plan that is fluid. In this
section, we will discuss the way curriculum should be used and followed in the classroom,
even if many schools are not necessarily listening to the research.
The best way to use curriculum is in a cycle, where the plan is in the hand of the teacher
(or group of teachers) and within reach of their revisions. The ideal curriculum cycle hinges
on three parts:

Planning: The curriculum plan is initially created based on what the teachers and
administrators generally accept as the needs of the students. The units are designed to
adcurriculum plan is initially created based on what the teachers and administrators
generally accept as the needs of the students. The units are designed to address the
skills that are layered in the standards while working thematically through a focus.
Everything from the “Curricular components” section above is created, and the plan is
distributed to, and reviewed by, the teaching staff.

Implementation: Members of the teaching staff each design their own lesson plans to work
within the structure of each unit in the curriculum plan. They make sure that their lesson
objectives clearly address the skills outlined in the standards of the unit and that each
activity prepares the students for the summative assessment. Ideally, teachers of the same
curriculum have periodic time to meet.

Reflection: After implementation of the curriculum, teachers meet with each other to discuss
the strengths and weaknesses of the plan. The teachers use data they have collected from
the formative and summative assessments and not just anecdotal evidence to inform their
discussions. Teachers share the different strategies they used during each unit to try to
identify if the struggles their students had were because of their own unique instruction or
were in line with the other students who had different students.

Revision: This is the most important part that many schools are not giving their teachers
the freedom to use. Teachers use what they found in their reflection to inform revisions to
the curriculum. If the students had difficulties or skills they did not attain, then the teachers
rewrite unit plans to ensure these problems are addressed. Without the revision process,
the reflection process is not very effective. Next year the teachers go through the same
process and make sure their planning and instruction are constantly improving.

8.3 Varying instruction

If there is one thing that educational theorists agree on nowadays it is that the best way to
reach the most students is by varying and differentiating your instruction. We will begin by
first discussing one of the basic ideas behind the efficacy of varied instruction, which is
the idea of multiple intelligences.

8.3.1 Gardner’s multiple intelligences

A Harvard professor named Howard Gardner penned the theory that there are multiple
types of intelligence, each valuable in its own way. If you accept this theory, which many
do, this means that the students in your class will all have specific strengths and
weaknesses
that you can access through varied instruction. Here are Gardner’s multiple intelligences:

Visual-spatial: People who are intelligent in this area are very good at understanding
their environment and reasoning spatially. They respond to any activities that allow
them to problem-solve, organize, or create with their hands.

Bodily-kinesthetic: People who are intelligent in this area are very controlled with their body
and are prone to athletic and/or dexterous tasks. They respond to activities that require
them to move, act, and learn with their hands.

Musical: People who are intelligent in this area are usually natural musicians who
understand sound and rhythm more than most. They respond to rhythmic activities and
anything that involves music or creating sound.

Interpersonal: People who are intelligent in this area have an easy time connecting with
people and love to help others. They respond to anything that involves working in a group,
participating in a discussion, or any activities that require them to make connections with
the people around them.

Intrapersonal: People who are intelligent in this area are very in tune with themselves and
are good at setting goals and keeping themselves on track to accomplish them. They
respond to much more independent and self-driven learning because it allows them to take
control of their own progress.

Linguistic: People who are intelligent in this area are very good with words. They
understand the language and how to use it to their advantage. They respond to activities
that require them to read, use words creatively, and/or solve word puzzles.

Logical-mathematical: People who are intelligent in this area are very good at reasoning
and calculating things. They respond to activities that require them to work logically, reason
things out, and solve puzzles.

8.3.2 How to differentiate

Here is where you find a point of contention in the educational community. Differentiation is
a buzzword that politicians and administrators love to throw around without actually helping
teachers understand what it is. Teachers often fear differentiation because they are afraid
of the amount of work that idea brings with it. Differentiation does not have to be scary
however. Here are some simple steps you can take to differentiate your instruction and
appeal to students of different abilities and learning types.

Get to know your students: There is no way to vary instruction to better accommodate your
students if you do not first find out some information about them. There are a few different
ways that you can research your students’ learning styles. The first way is to ask the
students. This strategy works better with older students, but it often yields the most honest
results. The
second way is by giving your students benchmark assessments early on in the year.
This strategy can give you a lot of information, but it can also be skewed by such things
as apathy, distractions, and poor testing abilities. The third way you can find out
information about your students is through observing them during classroom activities.
You may have guessed that the best course of action is not one of these strategies
alone but rather a combination of all of them. As a teacher, you need to use everything
at your disposal to better understand what works best for your students.

Be prepared with a toolkit of teaching strategies: Now that you have a good understanding
of each of your students and how they learn best, you need to be able to access your vast
repertoire of teaching strategies to facilitate your students’ needs. These teaching
strategies should also be very diverse, covering a wide array of teaching styles, including:

Direct instruction: People like to discount this old-school, traditional method of teaching,
but it works in the classroom as long as it is not the only strategy that you are using.

Cooperative learning: Cooperative learning is a very trendy teaching style because it allows
students to take responsibility for their learning, and it is conducive to a student-centered
learning environment.

Inquiry-based learning: According to many experts, this is one of the most rigorous forms of
teaching because it requires students to create their own questions or hypotheses, research,
experiment, or explore these questions or hypotheses, and then draw conclusions based on
their findings. The skills involved in this process are very complex, and if you are able to help
your students get used to successfully going through this process, you will see significant
results.

Information-processing strategies: These types of lessons ask students to practice and

deepen their core skills to become better writers, readers, and thinkers. Students are
getting the practice they need in the skills that are most important.

Identify which strategies will work best for your students: So you know what your
students need to succeed, and you have a toolkit full of teaching strategies. Now it is time
to put it together and match teaching strategies with your students’ needs.

Vary your instruction: Here is the part where many teachers and administrators slip up.
People often think that varied or differentiated instruction means that you always have your
students doing group work and working independently. Sometimes, direct, teacher-
centered instruction is appropriate. The point of varied and differentiated instruction is that
you balance different types of instruction throughout your curriculum. When it is
appropriate, you use direct instruction, and when it is appropriate, you use cooperative
learning. The point is that you use all types of instruction to appeal to every different kind of
student and to make the most impact you can.
Assess and adjust: As we discussed when we covered following a curriculum, you need to
be able to assess your students, reflect on your teaching, and then adjust your teaching
strategies to better serve your students. Teaching is a growing experience, and you need
to constantly question and adjust your strategies to become more effective.

8.4 Teaching strategies

Going through all the existing teaching strategies would take an entire course, so we
are instead going to focus on a few effective strategies that appeal to students with
different learning styles.

Jigsaw: A jigsaw is a great cooperative learning strategy because it gives students the
opportunity to take control of their learning, but it also is a natural scaffold. In a jigsaw, you
group your student to interact with new knowledge and give them a short amount of time to
focus on a specific topic. Each group has a different topic, so at the end of this short period
of time, you rearrange the groups, and students become experts on their original topic. For
example, you can split your class of twenty-five students into five groups of five students
each and have each group researching a different European country. Then you can go to
each group and give each member a number from 1 to 5 and have the students rearrange
based on those numbers. Now you have five groups, each containing one student who has
researched each European country. Now the students teach each other.

Think-pair-share: This is a very versatile strategy because it can be used for a 5-minute
initiation or for a class-long activity. Put simply, you give your students something to think
about, then you ask them to get into pairs, and then you ask them to share what they came
up with. This can be done as formally or informally as you would like, and it works with all
different types of content.

Fishbowl: This is a modified Socratic seminar that asks students to participate in a

discussion and evaluate each other’s performance during the discussion. Essentially,
students are structured into two circles, one inside the other. Inside the circle, students are
given a topic, question, or idea to discuss. In the outer circle, students are paying attention
to the inner circle and evaluating the strength of their discussion. The most effective
fishbowls ask the students in the outer circle to focus on specific parts of the discussion.
Teachers can either ask each outer student to focus on one inner student or ask each outer
student to focus on one skill, idea, or form of discussion.

Testing a hypothesis: As we mentioned in the previous section, asking students to pose

hypotheses, test their hypotheses, and then draw conclusions is asking them to access very
high levels of thinking. This does not have to be a strategy that only works in science
classes. In an English class, you might ask students to read a selection from an author and
then create a hypothesis that guesses what another piece by that author is going to focus
on.
This will require the students to understand the piece at a high level and be able to use that
understanding to make predictions about a related text.
8.5 Meaningful assessments

We discussed assessments in the previous module, so we will not discuss them ad

nauseam here. To ensure that your assessments are authentic and meaningful, you need
to make sure that they align with the standards you are trying to meet and the objectives
you have set out for your students to help them reach those standards. To make an
assessment truly meaningful, though, it needs to be reflective of something that students
might see in whatever career they end up in, and your assessments should also give
students many different ways to display their knowledge. Here is an example of the
different types of assessments you can create:

Writing: Your writing assessments do not have to be traditional essays (although do not
discount these classics). You can find many different ways to be creative with your
writing assignments. You can have your students create such things as storybooks,
poems, and journals.

Performance: Having your students create a presentation, a performance, or something

that requires them to stand in front of the class and create something informative and
entertaining is a great way to find out how much your students know. These types of
activities are creative, entertaining, and really allow students to have fun with their learning.

Art: Students can also display their understanding of a concept by creating something
artistic. Whether you ask your students to create an illustration, draw or build a diagram, or
create a visual project, you should allow them to access their creativity to display their
understanding of the material.

Teaching: Asking your students to teach material to a class is a great way to truly judge
whether or not they know it. As you know or will soon find out, you cannot effectively teach
something unless you understand it inside and out.

Curriculum and lesson planning are extremely important in helping your students find
success, but you also need to be able to handle a classroom to make sure you can carry
out your plans. Classroom management is probably the biggest struggle for new teachers
who are still trying to determine their style and do not yet have the tricks that a veteran has.
In this module, our focus will be on making you feel like a veteran before you enter the
classroom so that you can implement your plans and help your students excel. No one has
perfect classroom management, but we will help you feel comfortable enough to control
your classroom the way you see fit.

Module 9: Classroom management

9.1 Setting expectations

9.2 Respect
9.3 Accountability

9.4 Choosing your battles

9.5 Unique strategies

9.1 Setting expectations

Students need structure to be successful in school, but that does not mean you have to be
a disciplinarian who spends most of your time punishing students for small misbehaviors. It
just means that you need to be clear about your expectations for the class right from the
beginning and carry out those expectations throughout the rest of the year. We will start by
discussing some of the strategies you can use to set expectations for your class, and then
we will review some common expectations that teachers have found success with in their
class.

9.1.1 How to set expectations

More than anything make sure that you address classroom expectations on the first day to
set the tone for the rest of the year. First impressions are important, and if you begin the
year allowing behavior that you do not want to allow for the rest of the year, you are going
to make things more difficult for yourself.

One method for setting successful classroom expectations is to use the first day of class to
have the students work together to create those expectations. Have your students get into
small groups and discuss what they expect to get out of this class, what they expect from
you, and what they expect from themselves and the other students. After five to ten
minutes, bring the class together and create a list that you all narrow down into the final set
of classroom expectations. Bringing your students in on the process gives them the
opportunity to see the importance of these expectations, stresses them, and gives students
the feeling that they are in control. Now, when they break a class rule, they are breaking
the very rules they helped to develop.

You can also draw students into the activity by having them work together on a class
pledge or class promise. This would work very much the same way except the pledge or
promise is more personal and less quantifiable. If you would like, you can then take the
class pledge and synthesize it into a list of classroom expectations so that you have both.

You can also take a more traditional route and create the list of expectations on your own.
If you do this, just make sure they are already posted when the students walk into the
classroom and take some time to review them with the class. Students will notice them if
they are posted on your wall, but they won’t really remember them unless they are explicitly
reviewed.
9.1.2 Common expectations for classrooms

Even if you ask your students to come up with classroom expectations, you obviously
want to make sure they will be effective. As the students make suggestions and you
generate the list, find subtle ways to steer the list towards what you were looking for. By
doing this, you can ensure the expectations are clearer and that they encompass
everything you think is important. Here are some of the expectations you should definitely
make sure are on your list:

Be respectful of others: This is probably the most classic and universal expectation for you
to set for your students. This is a great expectation because it encompasses so many
things. It refers to students being respectful to the teacher, to other students, to the school,
and to anyone who walks into the room. A respectful environment is more conducive to
learning because students feel more comfortable to take risks and are less likely to fear
ridicule.

Routines: We are not going to outline your routines here because you will come up with
them on your own, but you should try to set a routine for your students. It will save class
time throughout the school year and make your lessons flow better and engage the
students more effectively. Here is an example of some routines you may want to outline for
your students:

When the students come in, where do they get the daily paperwork? If you get your
students into the habit of looking in a specific spot every day when they walk in the door for
any worksheets or other paperwork, you will save the time of having to hand them out and
take advantage of time that you wouldn’t have in the lesson anyway, i.e., the time they take
walking to their seats.

Is there a routine or set of rules for when students can leave to go to the bathroom and
if they need to tell you or not? This seems petty, but it can prevent many interruptions
from students not knowing if they can just leave or not.

When you have class discussions, how do students participate? Do they raise their hands
and wait to be called upon? Do they just speak out and respect each other enough to act
civilly? Do you have a ball or other object that students can hold when it is their time to
talk? These types of routines really help students understand how they should act and what
behavior is not conducive to a respectful classroom.

Responsibility: All students need to display a modicum of responsibility for their learning,
but the responsibilities for which you hold your students accountable are up to their age
and your preference. Whatever you decide, though, you should be clear and up front about
the rules to ensure your students follow them right from the start.

9.2 Respect

We briefly discussed respect in the previous section, but it is so important to the way you will
manage your classroom that it warrants its own section. Building an atmosphere that is
based on mutual respect will help you avoid most of the problems new teachers face.
Let’s first discuss how respect manifests in your classroom.

9.2.1 Why is respect important?

Respect is a fairly small word that represents a lot and can have many different
manifestations in the classroom. Respect in the classroom does not just mean that
students listen to the teacher; it is so much more than that. There are three types of respect
you need to facilitate in your classroom:

Respect for the teacher: This is the kind of respect people usually think about when you
talk about respect in the classroom. While this is only one of three types, it is still extremely
important. Part of discovering who you are as a teacher is discovering your teaching style.
Some teachers demand specific behavior in their classrooms and hold students
accountable for acting outside of these guidelines, while others are more laid-back in their
style. Neither will work, however, if the teacher has not gained the respect of the students.
If the environment is too strict and students do not respect the teacher, they will lash out
and be combative. If the environment is too laid-back and loose and students do not
respect the teacher, they will walk all over him or her and not listen. Regardless of what
your teaching style evolves into, your classroom environment has to be predicated upon
respect.

Respect for other students: Besides direct lecturing, almost every teaching strategy
requires students to interact with each other or take intellectual risks. If your students do
not show respect for each other in the classroom, these strategies will not work. How can
you expect a student to answer a question that he or she is not sure of when the other
students in the class feel justified in disrespecting and ridiculing him or her? If you ever
want to have class discussions, work in groups, have your students present, or do
anything that involves students speaking out loud and taking a chance, you need to be
able to rely on the class treating each other with respect.

Respect for themselves: Just as much as you need your students to treat each other with
respect for students to feel comfortable taking risks, you need the students to have respect
for themselves. You do not have ultimate control over this, but you can do everything you
can to constantly encourage them to respect themselves. This means being encouraging
of students sharing and offering them positive reinforcement for contributing to the class.

If you can find a way to facilitate all three types of respect, you will be able to accomplish
so much more with your students.

9.2.2 How to facilitate respect

Creating a classroom environment that has its foundations in mutual respect does not
mean that you can never have fun. If done properly, it will actually give you the opportunity
to have
more fun in the classroom because you will know that your students can handle it and still
do their work and progress as students. Here are some tips on how to provide that safe
and enjoyable community classroom for your students:

Your classroom needs to be built on mutual respect, so discuss respect on the first day and
stress it throughout the year. Let the students know that they have your respect and that
you in turn require them to show you respect. Students will have a harder time being
disrespectful to teachers who have shown them respect.

This sounds obvious, but it needs to be said: follow your own rules and treat your students
with respect. Do not make them feel dumb for an answer that is wrong and lead by
example. If a student is off the mark with an answer or comment (in terms of being correct,
not in terms of being disrespectful), look for their train of thought and give them credit for
how they answered, while letting them down easy. Students will look to you to model the
behavior you are looking for from them, so be a good classroom role model.

Whenever you are doing an activity that will require students to step out of their comfort
zone, make mutual respect a spoken goal. If necessary, attach a grade to it. Students need
to be reminded constantly about how they should act, so when you especially need them to
show respect to each other, it is worth taking a few minutes to go over it. If you are doing
an activity that requires students to critique each other, model the behavior first to show
them what constructive criticism looks like.

Handle disrespectful behavior severely. Even if you have a lenient classroom where
students feel freer to express themselves, make disrespect where you draw a line in the
sand. If you have discussed respect and the students are aware of how they should act,
treat disrespectful behavior seriously, and implement real and meaningful consequences
for disrespectful actions.

Do not be afraid to bring parents and administrators into your plans for a respectful
classroom. Disrespectful behavior should be accompanied by both a punishment and by
contact home. Students will often make rash decisions and not worry about the in-school
consequences, but if your students know they will also face consequences at home,
they are much more likely to think about their actions.

9.3 Accountability

While most discussions of classroom management focus on managing classroom

behavior, accountability is an important aspect that you can control in many other areas of
your class. It is a pretty simple idea: set expectations for your students and then hold them
to those expectations. Why is it, then, that so many teachers have problems holding their
students accountable? Here are some possible reasons:
9.3.1 Why is accountability so hard?

Why is it hard for teachers to sometimes hold students accountable? If we all admit it is
important, why isn’t it just second nature?

Holding students accountable requires a confrontation. While teachers know that student
behavior will be better if they hold the students accountable, that does not make putting
their foot down any easier. While instinct tells you that the right thing to do when a student
acts inappropriately is to punish him or her accordingly, it can be hard to actually do it
because you know it will often end in an argument.

When you are trying to build an atmosphere of mutual respect, it can be difficult to know
when you are overreacting and when you just aren’t being strict enough. If a student clearly
acts inappropriately, then it may be easy to punish him or her immediately. What happens,
though, when the student toes the line of inappropriate behavior? At what point do you act,
and at what point do you let it go? This can be a very difficult decision.

If you come down too hard on students, it could encourage more inappropriate behavior
rather than appropriate behavior. If students feel they are being punished unfairly, they are
more likely to act out in defiance.

Some students are terrible at dealing with confrontation, and it can just be easier to ignore
their behavior. While this might be a good strategy with some students as long as they are
not being disrespectful and are doing their work, it could have a negative effect on the
class environment. Students do not like it when they are held to stricter standards than
their classmates, so if you make too many concessions, you end up either making
concessions for the entire class or upsetting the students who are acting appropriately.

Confrontations are stressful, and it is easier to just let something go or pretend you didn’t
see or hear it rather than make an issue of it.

Every student has a different story, and when you know that one of your students is going
through a tough time or has a less than satisfactory home life, you feel compassion
towards him or her and want to cut him or her some slack.

No one strives to be the mean teacher, and as much as you want to believe that you don’t
care what your students think about you, you will care.

9.3.2 How do you keep vigilant?

With all of these reasons to let things go, how do you remain vigilant? We all agree that the
right way to act is to punish inappropriate behavior with a reasonable teacher response, but
how do you make it easier, less stressful, and less disruptive? There is no easy answer,
but here is a strategy that might make things a little bit easier for you:
It’s not me; it’s you: Think about it. Most of the concerns listed in the previous section stem
from being the enforcer as the teacher. So, the best way to make things easier on you is to
remind the students that they are controlling their behavior. Instead of being the enforcer,
be upset that they have done this to themselves and will have to be punished. This shift in
attitude mentally shifts the confrontation and makes the student realize that their actions
are what are causing them problems. Of course, this only works if you have clear rules of
conduct for their behavior already in place.

As much as you may feel bad when you are doling out punishments, remember that you
are doing nothing wrong and have done nothing wrong. You are not the one who
misbehaved or acted inappropriately; they are. Put the burden back on the student, and
watch how many of them begin to check their own behavior.

When a student gets in trouble, your attitude and behavior should reflect the following

ideas: The student is the person who chose to break a classroom rule.

The student is the person who had the choice in this situation, not you.

You are forced to punish the student because of the rules you all set at the beginning of the
year.

This is going to help your students, so let go of your guilt

When a student misbehaves, treat it as if you are on their side and upset that they will
now have to face punishment. This makes the process almost seem that both of you are
experiencing the punishment and that you are beholden to the rules. The rules become
the enforcer, not the teacher. “Oh no, Billy. That’s the third time you had your phone out,
and now you have to get a detention.”

Notice how this shift in attitude helps you keep your students accountable without
making you feel the guilt you usually would. You will see that this is actually easier than
letting behaviors go and seeing your classroom slowly de-evolve and break down.

Students will begin to take much more responsibility for their actions. They will realize that
it is their behavior, not the teacher who is catching them, that is causing them to face
punishment. This shift will help you create the classroom environment that you want
without making you constantly be the bad person or the disciplinarian.

9.4 Choosing your battles

With everything that we have said about holding students accountable and creating a
classroom environment that is based on respect and having control over your classroom, it
is still important that you choose your battles. Your goal as a teacher is to help your
students find success, and that can’t happen if you are kicking your students out for every
little
infraction. This is especially true in the case of a volatile student. This does not mean that
you should let him or her get away with anything that threatens the environment in your
classroom, just that you need to decide what behaviors are worth the fight and what
behaviors are not. Here are some things to consider when working with a child who is
prone to confrontation:

What is causing this behavior? Many times the answer to this simple question will tell you
how you need to act. If the student just has a problem dealing with a confrontation, then
you can correct his or her behavior by quietly approaching it in a way that does not make a
scene. If the student needs to be able to speak to someone when he or she is having a
tough time, it might be smart to have a routine set up so that he or she can go see a
counselor or school psychologist when he or she feels an outburst coming.

With volatile students, try to focus your attention on prevention rather than reaction. Get
used to seeing the signs of a problem, and try to head them off before it gets to the
point where you have to impose a punishment or start a confrontation. Quietly
approaching a student when he or she seems to be having a bad day shows that you
care and might compel the students to take control of their behavior.

While students do not like it when someone gets different treatment than someone else
does, you need to remember that fair and equal are two different things. Just as you need
to differentiate your instruction to account for students who struggle with a skill, you need to
differentiate your management for students who have difficulty behaving.

Talk to the student. Ask what triggers outbursts and how you can best approach him or
her in a time of stress. Often, the student will know what will help. When he or she does
not, work together to try to come up with a set of rules and routines that hold the student
accountable while still giving him or her some breathing room.

Enlist the help of other students, with the consent of the volatile student of course. Does
the student have a friend who can help calm him or her down in stressful situations? If so,
you can deflate tensions by giving the friend a signal to step in so that you do not have to
start a confrontation every time the volatile student acts out. That being said, the friend is a
student also, who does not deserve to bear all of the weight of his or her friend. Use the
friend as a resource rather than a crutch to bear the weight of the disciplinary actions you
should be imparting.

9.5 Unique strategies

While the best strategy for creating a positive classroom environment involves
everything we have discussed so far in this module, sometimes you need to employ
fresh tactics to encourage positive behavior. Here are some unique strategies that can
help you take confrontation out of classroom management.
Countdown: There are many strategies like this, but essentially the countdown involves
having some sort of signal to the class that they need to calm down. If you do this
properly, you can get students to modify behavior without saying a word. When they get
out of hand, simply start the timer and let them regulate themselves.

Commercial break: If you have a very loud or social group, you can set up a routine where
students are rewarded for positive and diligent behavior with a commercial break or a
period of time during which they can break from work to get up and walk around and talk to
friends socially. You will need to regulate the time for the commercial break carefully and
keep it short (two minutes is probably best since that is the traditional length of commercial
breaks).

Buddy system: Pair up your students and hold them accountable for each other. If one of
the partners missed the directions, the other is there to explain it. If one of the partners is
acting up, the other is there to try to deflate the situation. Handle problems with one of the
students as problems with the pair to keep them linked in both reward and punishment.
This will not work, however, if one student is not compliant and always causing the
problems.

Number your students: Of course you want your students to feel like individuals and not
just numbers on a sheet, but assigning each student a number can be helpful. When you
need them to act quickly, either getting into groups, presenting ideas, or some other
behavior, save time by calling out numbers. “We’re going to have a debate; all the even
numbers get on one side of the room, and the odd numbers get on the other side.” This will
cut down on a lot of the wasted time of organizing students and will also promote
compliance and classroom harmony.

Tight schedule: Building up a tight routine can really help you encourage diligent behavior.
If you create a routine of bell work and exit slips, your students know they need to begin
working immediately as class begins, and they know they are accountable for something
before they leave. This may seem very simplistic, but it sets up a class routine and
promotes appropriate behavior. Students know they need to do this every day and come in
ready to work.

Module 10: Getting a TEFL job

You’ve learned everything you need to know, and now it is time to think about taking the
next step and getting a job in the TESOL field. Regardless of the training you have, getting
a job in any field can be difficult, so we will discuss how you can differentiate yourself from
others when you are seeking employment. In this module, we will discuss what you need to
start the process, how to build and write an effective resume, the best interview techniques,
and other skills you will need to display your value to potential employers. Everything we
have done so far has led up to this, so get ready to start marketing yourself to the kinds of
employers you would like to build a career with.
10.1 What do you need?

10.2 Building a resume

10.3 Interview techniques: what are they looking for?

10.4 Possible destinations

10.5 Preparing to join a different culture

10.1 What do you need?

There is much demand for qualified individuals to become teachers of English as a second
language, so the most important job we now have is to ensure that you can find your way
to the schools, companies, and organizations that are looking for someone like you. In this
section, we will look specifically at what you need to get a job in the TESOL field, helping
students who want to develop their proficiency in English.

College degree: Most schools and organizations will look for you to have at least a
Bachelor’ s Degree to become a TESOL teacher. That does not mean you need a BS or
BA in TESOL, although there are majors that are more desirable than others. The majors
that employers like to see, for example, are English, Language Arts, TESOL, Education,
and Linguistics.
Again, though, the demand for individuals is high in this field, so a BS or a BA in a different
major does not count you out.

Close study of TESOL: Courses like this one give you the background that you need to
look desirable to an employer. You may be required to get a specific certification, but many
employers are looking for a background in TESOL, which you now have.

Work experience: For many of you, this course is your first step towards becoming a
teacher or becoming a TESOL teacher, so you may not yet have work experience.
However, many organizations and schools welcome interns and volunteers at different
levels of commitment. Some of these organizations and schools offer a track towards full
employment from these volunteer or intern positions. Other organizations and schools are
looking for talented individuals to manage their volunteering staff, which could give you
good experience that you can segue into a career as a TESOL teacher. Showing that you
are passionate enough about your future career to work for free towards it will go a long
way in the eyes of a potential employer.

A strong resume: We will discuss how to build and write a resume in the next section.

A good interview: We will also discuss interview techniques in great detail in a later section.

10.2 Building a resume

In this section, we will discuss how to write a great resume, but we will first discuss what
you can do to build a great resume. This means looking at the activities, jobs, and interests
that will catch the eye of potential employers and getting experience in them. With that in
mind, let’s split this section up into two.

10.2.1 What looks good on your resume?

Before you even think about sending out your resume, you should think about what you
need to have on it to make it impressive and something that will help you stand out in a
stack of viable candidates. Let’s take a look at the kinds of experiences that employers are
looking for.

Education: This does not mean that you have to run out immediately and get a Master’s
Degree in TESOL, but rather that employers want to see that you have education that is
relevant to the job. As we mentioned in the previous section, most employers are looking
for candidates who have either a BA or BS. If you don’t have a college degree, your options
may be limited, though the windows of opportunity are not closed to you.

Employers ideally want you to have a BA or BS in a relevant field of study, though that is
not a deal breaker. If you have a degree in a related field, then that is great; if you don’t,
that just means you will have to make up for it in other parts of your resume. This course
will look great on your resume because it shows that you are committed to learning about
TESOL, and it shows you have educational experience in the direct field in which you are
applying.

Some employers might require a further certification, which depending on the situation may
require you to take an extra test or a short supplemental course. Again, whatever you are
lacking in this section, you will just have to make up in a different section.

Work experience: Of course it would look great if you have already worked in TESOL and
have previously held a job in the field, but you are just starting out so that is highly unlikely.
If you have teaching experience, that looks great so that is something you will want to
highlight. If you don’t have either, that is all right. However, you should look into getting
some intern or volunteer experience before you start looking for a job.

You can send out applications while you are getting the experience, but it will look good if
you have direct experience in the field even if it is unpaid (in some cases, it will look better
if it is unpaid because it shows a great passion and commitment). As we discussed in the
previous section, some of these intern and volunteer opportunities could lead to part- or
full- time employment in the field, so look closely at the companies and schools that are
offering these volunteer experiences.

Related work experience: Even if you are not experienced at all in the TESOL field, this
section is where you should display any work experience that is even tangentially related.
Have you ever worked with children? Have you ever worked with non-English-speaking
people (worked helping them, not just worked alongside a non-English-speaking
individual)? Think about what it takes to be a TESOL teacher and if you have used any of
the same skills in a different job.

10.2.2 How do you make your resume look good?

So you have all of your experiences and skills set up. Now how do you present it in a
resume that represents you well and makes you look good to potential employers? There
are some specific things you can do to make your resume stand out.

Formatting: You will want your resume to be clear and easy to read. You want the
employer to be able to pinpoint any piece of information that he or she wants as quickly as
possible.

Use wide margins to take advantage of space, but that does not mean you should fill every
bit of space with wordiness.

Use a bulleted list to make things short, sweet, and easy to read.

Organize your experiences and skills into logical and clear sections that are marked
accordingly.

Use bold and italic print sparingly but smartly to draw the reader’s eye to the information
that you really want to highlight.

Focus on accomplishments, not job descriptions: A potential employer does not need the
definition of your current or former job; they need to know what you accomplished at those
jobs that makes you a valuable asset to their company or school.

Mention your job title, but then describe what you accomplished and what you worked on
at that job. Were you a manager? Great. That means you led a team of employees to . . .
The point is to let the employer know you did a lot in your previous jobs and that what you
did for your former employers you can do for your future employer.

Constantly ask yourself why the employer needs to know that you did what you are
writing. If they do, highlight what they need to know. If they don’t, remove it.

Make sure that the accomplishments that you write are yours and not just your team’s or
your company’s. The employer isn’t hiring your project team; they are looking to hire
you.

Be specific: Being able to explain your former job in a fancy way is helpful, but that will not
separate you from the field. Be specific about what you accomplished and give the
employer something quantitative to work with. How did your work specifically improve
your former workplace?
No mistakes: Read your resume over five times and have five friends read it too. This may
seem like overkill, but something as simple as a typo is enough for an employer to toss
your resume aside. This is especially true when you are applying for a job to teach English
to new English language learners. If you cannot create a 1– 2 page document that is error
free, how can the employer expect you to be an effective English teacher?

10.2.3 Avoid these common resume mistakes

Even the best candidates make the mistake of submitting a below average resume and
then wonder why they don’t get a call back. Do your best to avoid these common resume
mistakes.

Being too vague: This may take a little more work, but you should be adjusting your resume
for each specific job you are applying to. Every job is different and has different
requirements, so why are you handing the same resume to every potential employer? You
should not be changing anything dramatically, but look closely at what the employer is
looking for and adjust your wording so it addresses their needs.

Focusing on jobs instead of experience: Telling the employer that you worked as <blank> for
<blank company> does not really tell them anything about who you are and what you are
bringing to the table. What was your focus at the job? What did you accomplish? Why
were you a great employee for your former employer? Find a way to highlight your
strengths and accomplishments.

Length: The old rule that your resume has to fit as a single side of a sheet of paper has
been thrown out the window. That does not mean, though, that you should turn in a
dissertation. Studies show that employers give each resume about twenty-five seconds of
attention, so you have to make sure that your resume is tight. It is acceptable, though, to
have a two- or three-page resume but only if you have a lot to show. Do not have a third
page on your resume just to tell the employer that your hobbies are sports and movies.
Use the space you need, be concise, but do not worry about fitting it onto one sheet of
paper.

No focus: Most resumes include an objective or career summary. If your objective is

missing or vague, you may not get a second look. This could be a great spot to tailor your
resume specifically to each employer you’re contacting. Be specific and highlight what you
are looking for and what you want to accomplish.

Too busy: Make sure that everything on your resume is in a logical place and that your
resume does not appear too busy. If the employer can’t make sense of what you are
saying, he or she is going to move on to the next one.

Missing important information: Now is not the time to be humble. Feel free to act humbly
in your interview, but here you should be showing the employer everything that makes you
desirable. Then, when you interview, they will have all those accomplishments in front of
them as they ask you questions.

10.2.4 Final resume tips

Here are some extra tips for how to make your resume as strong as possible. Remember
that your resume is what gets your foot in the door before an employer has even met
you; make sure it is strong.

Have a purpose in mind when writing your resume. Besides being organized and
categorized effectively, your resume should have a purpose and tell a story. The more you
know what that story is, the more a potential employer will see it.

Pay attention to your diction. Look at the job listing and determine exactly what the
employer is looking for, and use keywords that will draw their attention. If you are applying
online, some employers will filter the resumes they receive using a keyword search, so
make sure yours ends up on the top of the list.

Do not be afraid to discuss the future briefly in your resume. It can sometimes be helpful
for you to let the employer know what your career goals are (as long as they are goals that
show your loyalty to potential employers and how you want to build a career out of this
job).

Use numbers and figures when possible. We discussed making your accomplishments
quantifiable earlier, so if you can provide a number that displays your accomplishments,
do it.

It could be helpful to directly acknowledge any difficulties that the employer is facing that
you could solve. Do some research, but only use this if you find something relevant. Do
not just assume that the employer has a problem when they may not.

Whenever possible, use action verbs rather than “is” or “was.” This will highlight your role in
whatever accomplishment you are noting.

Avoid pronouns even though you would typically use them. You are the implied subject of
every sentence because it is your resume. Instead of writing, “I excelled in my
undergraduate work, earning a 4.0,” write, “excelled in undergraduate work, earning a 4.0.”
It gets more to the point and doesn’t bog down the space.

10.3 Interview techniques: what are they looking for?

Once your stellar resume has gotten you an interview, it is time to really show the
potential employer what you are about. Up until now, you have just been words on a piece
of paper, and though you obviously impressed the employer enough to stand out, you still
need to come ready to impress.

10.3.1 Interview tips

Do some research: We already suggested doing this when you were creating your
resume but look into the company or school again. Try to find out what exactly they are
looking for, what they are lacking, and what their mission is. These are all pieces of
information that will help you when you are planning for your interview.

Dress to impress: Be sure your clothes are clean and pressed. Even if you would not have
to do so for the job, dress formally, and try to look proper. While it won’t necessarily hurt
you to look a little flashy, you might be better off going with classic color combinations. You
want to look stable, responsible, and prepared.

Be prepared: Even though any good employer will have copies of your resume and other
materials on hand, bring extra copies in a folder of some sort. If you know you are
interviewing with a committee, bring enough to go around just in case. If you know they
are going to ask you about something specific, have an example ready to go. There is no
downside to being prepared, and in a best-case scenario, the employer is impressed by
your preparation.

Be enthusiastic and optimistic: It is a job interview, so it is OK to be nervous, but you

should still be enthusiastic. You should be happy to be there and optimistic about your
future with the company or school. Confidence is always an attractive quality, so
remember that you have prepared for this and that you should let yourself be confident.

Do not be late: This should go without saying, but it is worth saying. Be early for your
appointment, and if you are travelling a route you are unfamiliar with or that has the
potential to be heavily trafficked, give yourself extra time.

Pay attention to the person interviewing you: The interviewer will certainly be listening to
your answers, so listen to their questions carefully. Not only will this ensure that you don’t
seem uninterested, but it will also help you understand what they are looking for. You can
tell a lot about what an employer is looking for by the questions he or she asks. Pay
attention to the details and try to tailor your answers to what they are trying to get at.

Be specific: Many people come out of interviews happy with their performance because
they gave good answers to the questions they were asked. But, if you are not specific, the
employer might forget you by the time the next candidate walks in. Answer with as much
specificity as you can so that the interviewer remembers your answers and can quantify
your responses.

Ask questions: Be smart about the questions you ask, though. Many interviewers will end
the interview by giving you the opportunity to ask questions. Ask questions that show you
are interested in the job and the company or school. Do not ask how many vacation days
you get.

Be cognizant of your body language: The interviewer is going to be evaluating everything

about you, including your body language. Make sure you are projecting confidence, passion,
interest, and enthusiasm. Do not act overly comfortable, but try to stay loose and appear
that you belong there.

Anticipate questions: Many interviewers have prescribed questions to avoid legal issues, so
searching the Internet for common interview questions and preparing answers could really
pay off. You may even find that you end up with the same source that the interviewer used.

Practice: Being prepared is important, but don’t be afraid to practice. If you have someone
who will help you out, ask him or her to run through scenarios (such as an argumentative
interviewer or an interviewer who is intentionally trying to cause you anxiety to see how you
react). It seems like a lot, but if this is the career you want and the job you want, is there
really such a thing as too much preparation?

Follow up: Lastly, follow up with the interviewer after the interview. Do not ask if a decision
has been made yet; simply thank him or her for the opportunity to interview for the position
and say that you look forward to hearing from him or her. Be pleasant and grateful, and you
will make sure your name remains in their mind.

10.3.3 What not to do in an interview

Just as there are tips for how to act in an interview, here are some tips for how not to act in
an interview.

Try not to ramble. While you want to answer the interviewer‘s questions to the best of your
ability, keep your answers to the point. You will show that you know what you are talking
about, that you are listening to what they ask, and that you know how to get things done.

Be friendly, but do not be too personal. It is all right to make a joke, but it has to be a
joke you would be willing to make to a stranger. The interviewer is not your friend; he or
she is likely your potential boss (or at least a boss), so act appropriately.

Try your best not to look disinterested. If an interviewer has a group of candidates coming
in to interview, why would he or she offer the job to someone who does not seem to want
it? Pay attention to your involuntary actions and your body language, and make sure you
are projecting enthusiasm.

A common question that interviewers ask is why you are leaving your old job. Try to avoid
saying anything negative about your old employer or company. Even if you frame it as a
compliment to the interviewer or his or her company, it will still seem that you are being
disloyal, and no one wants a disloyal employee. Give a reason that is steeped in positivity,
such as you are looking to grow professionally.

Although you want to appear confident, do not bulldoze the interviewer. It is all right if you
take control of the interview at times, but always let the interviewer know that he or she is in
charge, or else he or she may be put off. Who wants to work with someone who is
just going to drown them out?

Have an opinion, a purpose, and a set of standards. You have to strike a balance between
confident and flexible. While no one wants to hire someone who is rigid and arrogant, no
one wants to hire someone who just goes along with whatever he or she thinks the
management wants.

Avoid being a cliché. The biggest cliché is answering the classic “What is your greatest
weakness?” by turning it into a strength by saying something such as, “My greatest
weakness is that I work too hard.” Your interviewer is not an idiot, and this is not going to
impress him or her. Give an honest answer, but also provide the work you have done to
improve on that weakness and how you handle your weakness on a daily basis.

10.4 Possible destinations

While many of you are looking to teach English as a second language in your home
country, there are many opportunities for teachers who would like to travel, see the world,
and learn

from different cultures. Here are some of the countries that are looking for the most help.

Europe

Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Poland, The Czech Republic, Hungary,
Russia.

Asia

Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, Mongolia,

Turkey. Latin America

Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia,

Chile. Middle East

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco.

10.5 Preparing to join a different culture

If you are deciding to use your TESOL talents to travel to another country and learn about
another culture, make sure that you are prepared for the culture you are about to immerse
yourself in. Research your destination and try to learn as much as you can about the
culture before you get there. If you do this, you can avoid offending anyone accidentally
and ease our way into the culture much more easily. Typically, you will likely experience
this new
culture in the following stages:

Beginning stage: Prepare for your journey by doing research about the culture, and make
sure you are ready for your journey and your new environment.

Initial happiness: You are in a new place, and everything is unique and cool. You will
initially feel so happy to be in this new place and excited to help the people you meet
there. Even if you have a great experience, this initial euphoria wears off.

Frustration: Once the happiness begins to wane, you are likely to begin getting irritated with
your new home. The culture is different, and much of what you loved about your home is
rare or not available to you anymore.

Adjustment: You are beginning to get used to the new customs and culture of your new
home. You find yourself less and less irritated by the things around you and are starting to
feel comfortable with them.

Adaptation: Once you begin feeling comfortable with the culture, you will start to truly feel
a sense of biculturalism, where you identify and even like the new culture you are
experiencing. Everything that was once foreign and odd to you now feels comfortable and
normal.

Reentry: When you leave this foreign culture to return home, you may find that you go
through all of these stages all over again, albeit at a much quicker pace. You will probably
always cherish your experience with another culture, but be very happy to be home
where you are more comfortable.