Common Teaching Mistakes

1. Common Teaching Mistakes Presented by: Hadar Ahmed Faraj

3. It's ok. Teachers make mistakes too.

4. Outline 1. Introduction 2. Too much teacher talking time 3. Giving a running commentary 4. Echoing your students 5. Completing their sentences 6. Giving unclear instructions 7. Not checking their understanding of instructions 8. Asking: Do you understand? 9. Suggestions 10. Video 11. Conclusion

5. Introduction: Teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) is not easy. Scratch that, it's real easy. Let’s face it! Nobody is perfect! Although there are many excellent teachers out there that know their job very well through experience, asking teachers, reading, attending workshops … , there are still things that need to be given a second thought throughout a teaching career!

6. In this presentation, we are trying to show some of the mistakes that an English teacher might make in or out of the class and sure there will be more to add to them ! Here are the most common ones that we hear, see and sometimes do.

7. . Mistake #1: TTT (Teacher Talking Time)Taking up all of the talking time The title in bold speaks for itself. In an ESL class, what is the most common reason students are enrolled? They want to SPEAK English! And what happens when the teacher speaks most of the time? They don’t have enough chances to actually practice their speaking skills. They take up too much of the talking time, either because they feel uncomfortable around silence or long pauses, or because they are over-enthusiastic to share their knowledge. More importantly, students need time to think, prepare their thoughts, translate, and decipher how to say it out loud. Embrace silence in the classroom as a good thing, and give your students time to think.

8. . • Mistake #2:The Running Commentary • Teacher: Okay class, for this activity we are going to play a game using this marker. I would usually use a ball, but I couldn't find one, it used to be behind my desk...oh well. Taking this marker, I'm going to draw two circles, like this, maybe a little smaller, okay... • Seriously? Students don't need to, nor do they want to hear your entire thought process of past, present, and future activities out loud. For ESL learners, this can be boring, extremely hard to comprehend, and just plain unnecessary. This goes hand-in-hand with TTT. Tell the students what they need to know, then save these for the break room.

9. . - Mistake #3: Echo Student: I went to the park Teacher: Good! You went to the park. Okay great. You went to the park. Quite simply, you want the student to talk more than you. When you echo what they say, it gives them less talking time. In addition, when you echo, they start to learn that they don't need to listen to anyone but you (the teacher who repeats everything). If you catch yourself doing this, stop it.

10. ` • . • - Mistake #4: Helpful Sentence Completion • Student: Eating fruits and vegetables is good… • Teacher: …for your health. Definitely, I try to eat at least… • When a teacher is trying to elicit particular vocabulary from the student, he/she is eager, often too eager, to hear the correct answer. If you start predicting the words a student is going to say, and blurting out the tail-end of a sentence, you are taking away from the student. An ESL learner, as previously mentioned, needs time to think and produce their own words and ideas. Taking that away from them by doing the sentence completion for them is counter-productive, and actually pretty annoying.

11. . • - Mistake # 5:Complicated and Unclear Instructions • This is a potential problem that can easily be fixed beforehand while lesson planning. Poor planning and loosely structured instructions can be very confusing to English learners. Even for a fluent English speaker, instructions can be hard to grasp. Try to be as clear and concise in your instructions as possible.

12. . • - Mistake # 6:Not Checking the Understanding of Instructions • "Ok class, ready…begin!" • Ending your instructions with something like this will often leave you with a classroom full of whispering students, marked by looks of bewilderment. A simple way to double-check is to ask a few students to repeat the instructions back to you. If the activity includes a question set, do the first question together as a class.

13. . - Mistake # 7: Ignoring boundaries between teacher and students ESL teachers should be friendly and strive to bond with students in order to achieve the best learning outcomes. But there’s a line between being friendly and being a friend. A teacher is meant to be an authority figure, one that is most definitely not on equal terms with students. It's all right to share some personal things and talk about family, cars, interests or hobbies. But you must never let it get too personal. Any personal information shared must be supplied to give students context when they are learning something new. It is not meant to be shared so you may be accepted by students.

14. Mistake # 8:Not asking others if they do not know something When a teacher does not know the answer to a question or something, he or she must just say “One of my co workers will know it and I should walk to his class and ask now!” Teaching is not going to the classroom, shutting the door and be alone! Teachers need support and guidance from other more experienced ones.

15. Mistake #9: Get stuck in a rut • Some instructors teach a course two or three times, feel satisfied with their lecture notes and PowerPoint slides and assignments, and don't change a thing for the rest of their careers except maybe to update a couple of references. Such courses often become mechanical for the instructors, boring for the students, and after a while, hopelessly antiquated.

16. . • - Mistake # 10:Teacher: Do you understand? • Student: Yes…? • 9 times out of 10, the student will answer yes; and 9 times out of 10, the student doesn't understand. Why? Well, nobody likes to feel like the dullest knife in the drawer. • In fact, a much better way to check and see if they understand is through example. Have them use the just learned language in a sentence, repeat the instructions, or have them explain the idea further. Try your best to never end a topic of study with, "do you understand?"

17. Suggestions

18. 1. Students should speak for 70% of the class time, while teachers speak for the remaining 30%. These percentages could be tweaked in cases where students are absolute beginners (50-50), very advanced learners in need of intensive speaking practice (90-10). This means that in most cases, your participation should be limited to giving instructions and explaining essential points. • 2. Be on friendly terms, talk about your car or what you did last weekend, but make sure students feel there is a boundary that can’t be crossed.

19. 3.Do not make major revisions in your course every time you give it. Rather, just keep your eyes open for possible improvements you might make in the time available to you. Go to some education sessions at professional conferences; read articles in educational journals in your discipline; and commit to making one or two changes in the course whenever you teach it. If you do that, the course won't get stale, and neither will you.

20. . 4. Teachers can try these classroom tested techniques which work with all age groups.

21. . A. Just whisper. Interestingly, whispering is a very effective way of enabling students to enunciate more clearly. Students who are having difficulty pronouncing words or letters correctly often benefit from trying to say the same phrase or letters in a whisper first. We naturally make a more conscious effort to form the letters more carefully when we whisper. Whispering also softens the pronunciation slightly

22. . • B. Tongue twisters • Alliterative phrases where every word starts with the same letter can be a fun and useful way to practice clear pronunciation and enunciation. • “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers”. • “Sally sells seashells at the seashore”. • And other tongue scrambling phrases make a delightful break to text book work. Introduce a new tongue twister once a week. Search the internet using the keyword “tongue twisters” to find lots of possible tongue wriggling phrases.

23. . • 3. Make it apply. • If you have adult working students, practice the vocabulary of their professions. Include practical everyday situational vocabulary as well like check writing terms and spelling out numbers, driver’s manuals, and forms they might have to fill out to apply for a job, visa, bank account, and so forth. Students are highly motivated by being able to handle daily living language.

24. . • 4. Exposure is a key. • Just as with so many other skills we learn, exposure and practice are critical for enabling learners to develop their budding language skills. In addition to practice in class, assign listening “homework”. Listening is such an important part of learning a language.

25. 5.Do not be afraid to introduce some game playing to your adult students, particularly if you are teaching evening classes for working students. Introducing short, active periods to breakup the textbook subject matter reawakens (literally) tired students and freshens their interest and motivation in the class.

26. . Video

27. Conclusion • In a nutshell, I must say we can be better teachers and impart better knowledge to our ESL learners if we can overcome all above mentioned mistakes.