Aims and Objectives for Teaching and Learning Essay

The successful teacher is the armed teacher. Lessons’ plans and repertoire of activities are our arms. In order to achieve genuine communication in the classroom, every lesson should be wisely planned and perfectly provided having balanced variety of activities. The teacher of ESOL must manage the class involving all the students all the time to make them active learners. First of all, the teacher is to create a comfortable atmosphere in the classroom according to TESOL general principles. They are: 1. â€Å"Look after your students. 2. Be a caring person. 3. Raise students’ self-esteem. 4. Give deserved praise. 5. Be yourself.† Every lesson should start with friendly chatting with students in a natural way to give them the opportunity to act in real life and to show them the teacher interest. E.g. Ask them about last weekend at the week beginning. It is absolutely important to pronounce the students names correctly. When having difficulties, we may involve the students in learning their names asking them to explain the name meaning and to correct our pronunciation. Paying attention to every student is a clue to a genuine communication. So, we are to look at all the students in the class. The caring teacher moves around the class as a ‘prowling lion’ to make the students feel encouraged, and changes their focus at the moment the subject of learning is changing. E.g. When talking about nature, move to the window and ask some student to describe the sky, another student to talk about the trees behind the window, and so on. We must care about the seating model of the classroom. Facing with standard rows we need to rearrange the furniture to circle or semi-circle/horseshoe to create the most comfortable communication. If rearranging is impossible the teacher may ask the students to walk around the class to find partners for pair/group work. Also, we can make groups asking one pair to turn round to another pair when seating in rows. We may see the separate tables for groups in some schools. This model is also appropriate as allows the teacher to move around the class prompting and explaining something to the table groups. The furniture arrangement may be dynamic, changing every lesson according to the activities. As to a groupwork, it is one of the best techniques of involving the students into communication. The preferred number of students for the group is five to have the opportunity to of major view because of an odd number. The group of five students is big enough to participate in communicative activities (e.g. role-plays, information/opinion gaps and collaborative work), and small enough for effective interaction. However, we may divide the students into smaller or bigger groups, pairs, and teams according to the activities. When organizing a pairwork/groupwork we should take into account some aspects: †¢ friendship. People in the group are to be pleasant to each other. We can make it clear asking the students to write the confidential lists of their preferences and dislikes; †¢ nationality. Teaching multi-lingual classes we shouldn’t put into groups the students of the same nationality to avoid the using of the mother tongue. †¢ streaming. Weak and strong students are to be mixed in pairs and groups to make cooperative work to be effective and helpful. †¢ gender and status. According to some contexts, we can’t put men and women into one group. Also, teaching business English, we should know the status of our students to be sure in the appropriateness of putting people together. We must always remember about L.T.T.T. as we want to achieve genuine communication. The more students speak, the more they learn how to do it. So, we should decrease our talking to increase the talking of our students. E.g. Explaining the grammar involve the students asking them for their examples of the point. Using the white/black board we must write clearly. It’s possible to print something if keeping a board in order is difficult. The white/black board is quite appropriate instrument for various activities as table filling, games, errors’ correction, etc. Encouragement is the cornerstone of communication in class. ‘No!† may discourage everyone. That’s why we should use the more kind intonation as ‘No, but†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ Frequent use of ‘good’ is also appropriate, as in ‘Good, but†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ Giving a puzzled expression to encourage a student to reformulate the sentence is good practice to keep high level of motivation to communicate. Grammar terminology needs to be minimized as it possible. Bur the teacher must know the grammar to keep the credibility. Encouraging students to learn English outside the classroom develops their receptive and productive skills. As for extensive listening, we can find various authentic materials on the Internet. E.g. news reports, radio podcasts, TEFL listening materials, TV shows, songs, etc. To develop the extensive reading we can build up a library of suitable books in our SAC. We can create the website to involve students in writing their blogs for informal communication. And we can go outside the classroom for speaking in an informal environment. Agency gives students the opportunity to make some decisions about the learning process and keeps them encouraged. Learning journals brings much sense helping the students to communicate freely and creating the dialogue between teacher and student. Questions are very popular in a communicative approach. But we should remember some rules: †¢ don’t address the question to keep the attention; †¢ use ‘wait time’ to encourage; †¢ don’t ask students in fixed order, be unpredictable; †¢ ask everyone equally. Two types of questions, i.e. closed and open-ended, help to activate students’ mind in various ways. The open question is appropriate for the lesson starting to focus the students’ attention on the topic. To manage the students successfully we must differentiate their work according to the abilities by task, by support, or my homework. We must be armed at all points to manage interruptions. For example, to have extra copies of textbooks, pencils, and rubbers in the case they may be forgotten; don’t wait for coming-late people; give an extra explanation for lost-on-point students; deal with personal problems outside class time. To help students to process information we should use a VAK presentation that allows different types of learners to accept the point using their best way, i.e visual, auditory or kinesthetic. Creating the successful classroom let us avoid the problem behavior of the students. Engaged and successful students with raised self-esteem have no t ime and purpose to behave badly.