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Classroom Management for Teaching English as a Foreign Language - Teacher Talk Time

 

When considering Teacher Talk Time, we can perhaps look at the major advantage and disadvantage of the teacher actually talking. The major advantage is that you as the teacher are usually the only real model for the language, the source of correct English. So at some stages, your talking time is very important to the students. So when you?re modeling language, that use of Teacher Talk Time can be very advantageous. There are major disadvantages to overusing Teacher Talk Time, however, and perhaps the major one is that whenever the teacher is talking, the students are listening and if the students are listening, then they themselves cannot be talking. So, Teacher Talk Time reduces the opportunity for Student Talk Time. So, we should try to minimize the use of Teacher Talk Time wherever possible. How can we do that? Well, there are a number of simple ideas. We?ve already looked at the idea of using mime and gestures and here, we could include pictures. Secondly, then we need to make sure that we?re only using language that?s at their level. For a low-level group, that means, that the language available to us as the teacher, is going to be quite limited. That limited language will in itself reduce Teacher Talk Time. And perhaps the final idea for this particular list is to make sure that we avoid the use of jargon and elaboration. Perhaps the main message here is to keep it simple.


Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next.

This unit deals with the future tenses, and their usages. It was helpful for me mostly because it gives thorough explanation of some difficult points and aspects of each future tense. Through this unit, I have grasped all the subtle differences among the tenses, their strict usage rules within a certain timeframe, and how best to teach these delicate distinctions to students.I found this unit particularly interesting because of the varying importance (or lack there of) placed on the accuracy of English grammar, punctuation and spelling. Of course they are important when learning to write, but no so important when learning to have a simple conversation which is important to know especially when trying to target a student's objective in the course.

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