Super-charge your New Year classes 2

Helping your students to make leaps in their English learning in 2021

If you are back to teaching in the New Year, there is no better time to refocus students and refresh your teaching approach to help boost student motivation and progress.

Following on from our earlier article with 3 ideas to improve English classes and learning, here are three more great ideas for optimising your English teaching in 2021.

1. Revise language and check on goals more often.
   Check in at the end of each month to go over past corrections, new language and confirm progress.
   Regular tests help show what language gaps there are, give students something to revise for and also highlight progress. Tests can be informal or you could set fun, regular competitive quizzes between students based on past material. If teaching online via Skype, you can copy the chat history into a Word document and send it to your student as a revision tool.
   
   
2. Vary teaching approaches.
   We can often get stale, presenting the same sort of material week after week and using it in similar ways. Could we try some new ideas? Could we learn some new techniques? Might we change the pace of our lessons – speed them up or slow them down? I’ve been trying out some close listening tasks recently, requiring students to be attentive in order to re-tell a story. I’ve read a short anecdote with a little twist at the end. After reading, I ask them some comprehension questions:
   What happened at the beginning….?
   And then what….?
   How did it end….?
   What was the twist? 
   I’ve helped them with their answers, correcting or prompting where necessary, and encouraging them to include any useful new vocabulary. Then, I’ve asked them to re-tell the story as a whole. If they have stumbled, I have prompted them and then got them to repeat it until they have it correct.
   
   
   
3. Push your students to increase their range of useful phrases.
   The best way to do this is have some phrases ready and a context. For example, you could ask your student to tell you about when they met their husband. Ask them to re-tell using these expressions.
   The first thing I noticed about him was...
   What attracted me to him most was...
   I’ll never forget our first date; we… 
   

Your first classes back are a real opportunity to make some changes. What will you be doing differently?

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At Global English TESOL, we are all about helping you become the best teacher you can be, and so we recognise that even experienced teachers need a bit of tune-up. That’s where our Spotlight can help you with new teaching techniques, feedback and support in live, tutor-led Zoom sessions. Find out more >>

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