Could you be a teacher?

This week's project is each small group of students to teach a half-hour slot on Friday.  They have chosen their own topics, including: situational language (at the post office, restaurant, bank, etc), phrasal verbs, and colloquial language (at the pub, etc).

I'll be looking forward to putting my feet up for a couple of hours on Friday, and also to seeing how they approach the challenge of making interesting classes.

Here are some tips for Friday, and about teaching in general:

• Repetitititition - this is one of the most fundamental ways that children learn language.  They sing the same nursery rhymes again and again (and again).  However, it is not so easy to convince/coerce/force adults to do this, and it is very difficult to think of ways to make repetition fun.  One hint is to sneak the repetition into your own language, so if you want to teach them phrasal verbs, ask "what did you get up to yesterday?" every day.  Another useful technique is to create a list of questions that force the students to use the target grammar/vocabulary when they are answering, and then have them talk to each other about these.  My personal favourite is to use songs, because if they end up singing along to themselves when they are on the bus, they will automatically remember very good examples of important language.

• Interaction - our brains have to sort through a lot of useless information every day (the colour of the bus seat, what the person sitting next to you is reading, etc).  But, when something is really important, it has to remember it.  One way to show your brain that what you are studying is important is to use it in conversation with other people. When you do this, your brain realises that the thing you are trying to learn is something useful, so you will remember it much faster than if you just repeat it or do exercises.

• Closed & open practice - start by presenting the language you want the students to learn, then have some closed practice, which is something like a matching or gap-fill exercise.  This allows the students to get some experience with the language in a safe way.  Next, give them a situation that allows them to use the language in their own dialogues.  This is open practice because the way they use the language is up to them.

Here are some more general tips that I've picked up along the way:

• Use background music during conversational/interactive tasks.  This makes students feel less shy about speaking to one another because they can't be heard by the others so easily.  It also creates a more relaxed atmosphere, and makes it easier to shut people up at the end because they know that when the music stops, the task has finished!
• Get students to choose who goes next.  It forces them to learn the names of everyone in the class, and this creates a much more friendly and social vibe. 
• Distribute girls evenly around the classroom.  Girls are more sociable than guys.  When guys sit together, they often don't interact at all.  Put a girl amongst the guys and it often solves this problem.