Second TESOL Course Complete!

Today I finished my second TESOL course offered by Arizona State University through Coursera. These classes are light, fun, and generally not all that challenging. In this module, we learned about how teaching methods have changes from the early 1920’s to present day. It was interesting, and I highlighted activities or methods I could apply to my classes while taking notes in google drive.

Let me take a moment to say how awesome google drive is. When my wife got me my new PC in Seoul, I was really stoked. It’s custom and the guys built it to my specs, 16 gigs of ram, around 4 TB of hard disk space, and a really swanky 4 gig nvidia graphics card. Also, miraculously it has an English version of Windows 7. However, joining a university, I figured I was going to have to shell out a few hundred bucks for word processing software. I did some research, and not feeling like spending more money came across a recommendation from the University of the People to try google drive. Now, instead of having to send my files around when I want to look at them, they’re all right there in the cloud, essentially having the same functionality as MS Word, but for free! Anyway, if you haven’t tried google docs in google drive, save yourself some serious headache and money and give it a go.

Getting back to teaching, so there were some really cool techniques in this course that I liked. Some of them I used in my classes already, like substitution drills and chain drills. Substitution drills are easy and super scalable. You take any sentence, remove a word or phrase from it, and have the students fill in the rest. Let’s say something like “Jimmy goes to the store to buy an apple.” You can write on the board, “__________ goes to the store to buy a/an ____________.” This is good for practice and getting kids to use the form, but sometimes you have to watch out as kids will naturally pick on other kids (in like, 75% of the cases I found). So, this could turn mean with kids saying things like “Benedict goes to the store to buy a brain.” Chain drills are fun and simple too. You do them by saying something like, “I like bananas.” the next student says “He likes bananas, and I like apples.” This can go on for a while and is a good way of figuring out who needs to work on their attention / memory skills.

Techniques I haven’t tried that I’d like to are the multiple concert approach, Total Physical Response, and script writing/acting approach. The multiple concert approach is when you read the same text, but in different ways. The first time, you read it to the beat with music in the background. The second time you read it normally twice. All the while, you have students taking notes on the dialogue or reading passage, and on the third time you have them recite the reading from their notes. This gets the students engaged and hyped up by sing-reading, and then focused by having them take notes. The Total Physical Response method is neat, and aimed at pure beginners. In it, you speak English while making gestures. For example you could say, “Hello Mom!” while waving at your imaginary parent. Then say “I jump to my home!” and jump to a picture of a house on the whiteboard. This could be fun, and I think I’ll try it next time I teach a really young group of kids, but this I can see as being really physically demanding (given you’re doing this and at the same time controlling a class of children). So we’ll see how that goes. The last one is really up my alley for more intermediate / advanced students. I can give them a situation like sending a piece of mail at the postoffice, watch a short relevant clip, and then have them write a script and preform it. This could be a great group activity.

That was really what I took away from this course, and while I learned some cool techniques, I found it somewhat less interesting to other courses I was taking. I enjoy learning about teaching and how to become a better teacher, but there was some serious competition for my longterm memory slots with the other things I do online such as CodeAcademy, checkio.org.