Marmara Elt Resources

English educators have stressed the need for professional qualifications in the “art” of English teaching if teachers are to help students learn the language in an effective way.

They said the presidential transition team’s plan to hire skill-based teachers disregards the rule that there is an art to teaching.

A fluent language skill is not enough for educators as English teaching is much more than supplying information, they said.

Edith Allen, an instructor in the English for International Students Program at Duke University, told The Korea Times that teaching English requires not only fluency, but also a broad range of interdisciplinary knowledge and training in linguistics, education and speech pathology.

Therefore, it is naive to say, “ if they speak English, they can teach it,” she said.

Allen pointed out that there certainly is an art to teaching that helps students learn the foreign language in an effective way.
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What is immersion role-playing?
Immersion role-playing is simply taking the idea of paired readings, one in which students take on various roles and one with which students are familiar, and expanding it into a class-wide or course-wide structure. The student ceases to be someone learning English as a second language and instead assumes a persona which he or she constantly uses in the classroom. It is like acting–the student becomes the role. The rules of theater apply in the classroom: don’t break character; take your role seriously; be convincing.
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Teaching in today’s EFL corporate classroom requires a “Cool Corporate English Consciousness”. Because of the great emergence of multinational companies and globalization there has been a surging demand for corporate English training all around the world (English has long ago been established as the standard language for international business). Many students attend classes out of professional necessity; they require more than just textbook work to satisfy their communicative needs. Many times textbooks have strong limitations in choosing motivating material because they have to “guess” what a student will be motivated in based on current streams of popular culture. For example, if a student has a pending business presentation (in English) in a few days, which of the following topics do you think will be more motivating for him/her?
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Using drama in the classroom
Firstly,put students into 3 groups (of about 5).then, chose 3 vocabulary topics that i wanted to revise - e.g expressions using verb to go / adjectives describing weather / idioms for describing people then gave each team 1 word for each of the these topics on a card - e.g to go down with (an illness) / breezy.
then i gave each group a prop - i used a telephone, a bunch of flowers and a fake skull
i also had a pile of costumes which i allowed them to use whatever they wanted from (but you could also allocate these)
then got them to write their own plays, which had to include the relevant vocabulary and the prop. - what i didn’t do but should have done was to explain exactly what they would have to do before letting them see any of the props and costumes as it was quite difficult to hold their attention after that.
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