USING AUTHENTIC MATERIAL

Studying directly from the textbook day in and day out can be a bit dry. Spice up your textbook by adding some of your own materials to supplement your lessons and your students will not only be more interested and engaged, but ultimately better prepared to use their English out in the real world; that's why their studying anyway, isn't it?

So what do I mean by authentic materials? Well, anything written or spoken that uses English as a medium is appropriate, but here's a list to clarify:

Songs
Music videos
Films
TV shows
Newspaper articles
Novels
Short stories
Brochures
Letters
Emails
Weather Reports
Horoscopes
Recipes
Instructions
Blogs
Classifieds

Be careful when choosing your material. Reading Wall Street Journal reports in a beginners class is obviously a bad choice. It's important to keep the text authentic, but make sure that the material suits the level of your students. It's also important to pick your material with cultural sensitivity, and background knowledge of your students in mind. Don't choose texts that may be culturally insensitive or are full of cultural references that may prove too challenging for your students.

When material is chosen thoughtfully with students interests in mind, and materials are utilized effectively by teachers, you're sure to have a successful lesson which builds students interest and inundates them with real world language. In turn, this motivates students and builds up their confidence as they tackle material that they would find useful in the real world, and that's the point of learning English, isn't it? To use English in practical everyday situations. So why not provide a more practical approach to ESL teaching by utilizing authentic materials. Your students will be glad you did.

HOW TO TEACH VOCABULARY

Teaching vocabulary is a big part of language learning and an important job of the teacher to set up a context for learning vocabulary easily and choosing suitable words for the students to learn.

When teaching vocabulary it is important to cover meaning, form and pronunciation. This should be done in a methodical and organized manner. That being said, one common mistake that teachers make is drilling students on the pronunciation of vocabulary words or testing understanding of the form before any kind of meaning is established. Meaning must be established properly before form, pronunciation and even appropriacy is discussed.

In order to build students confidence and help teachers decide which words need to be formally taught, it's a good idea to test students current understanding of the vocabulary. (It's good to include some vocabulary that the students are likely to already know.) Test students' understanding through eliciting from a prompt, story or pictures; matching vocabulary with definitions, pictures or opposites; or categorizing vocabulary.

When covering the meaning of unfamiliar and unknown words there are many different techniques for getting the meaning across. Depending on the word being taught certain techniques will be more effective than others. A bit of common sense and some practice will help in choosing the proper technique from the list below to utilize.

1. Pictures
2. Realia
3. Board Drawing
4. Miming
5. Context
6. Translation
7. Scale or Cline
8. Synonyms or Antonyms
9. Definitions
10. Gestures