Classroom Management for Teaching English as a Foreign Language - Giving Instructions
Our next consideration is that of giving instructions to our students. In order for those students to effectively carry out an activity, we need to make sure we have given clear and unambiguous instructions. It's also very important to check that the students understand the activity before you start. If you've done that work correctly then the teacher shouldn't need to say anything once an activity has started because the students are very clear about what they're supposed to be doing. So some ideas when giving instructions. As we've mentioned use simple language. Secondly, rather than trying to explain an activity, then do a demonstration which is visual. Thirdly, try to use wherever possible common words that come up within every activity. These would be things like ?look?, ?listen?, ?your partner?, ?think?, and so on and so forth. So instead of continually changing the way you try to describe an activity, if we use these common terms, such as look and listen, use them as often as possible they're as many activities as we can, then those instructions will become clearer to the students as time goes on. Final thing here we need to be very sure that the students have understood our instructions and we can't rely on questions, such as do you understand. Quite often they will say yes whether they do or not. So in order to check that the students understand the instructions, ask them what they're going to do. If they cannot adequately answer that question there's very little point in moving into the activity so we need to go back and explain demonstrate again.
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.
