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CONTENTS 3-4 MUST READ: 4 Simple Retention Tricks That Will Help Your Students Remember 90% Of What You Teach In Class 5-6 MUST READ: Lesson Planning for Beginners: 5 Tactics for Excellent Preparation (or ‘How I learned to stop panicking and love my plan’) 7-8 MUST READ: Getting Hijacked – 5 Tactics for Going With The Flow When Plans Change 9-10 MUST READ: Filling Time, Not Killing Time: 10 Great Games for the Last Minutes of an ESL Class 11-13 MUST READ: The Calm, Consummate Professional: 10 Life-Hacks for Any Teacher 14 MUST READ: 7 Easy Ways to Inject Humor into Your ESL Classroom 15-16 MUST READ: The Bridge: How To Generate Noisy But Light-hearted Debate With Any Levels And Class Sizes Using An ESL Classic You Are Probably Already Familiar With 17-18 MUST READ: The Balloon Debate: An Integrated ESL Classic in 6 Easy Steps 19-20 AUTHORITY: Respect My Authority – 9 Concepts for Firm but Fair ESL Classroom Discipline 21-22 TRUST AND RESPECT: To be in Good Standing: 6 Ways to Gain Trust and Respect From Your ESL Students 23-24 OPEN LESSONS: How To Plan An Open Lesson: 7 Easy Steps 25-26 PERSONAL INFORMATION: Personal Information In The Classroom: How ‘Open’ And Direct Communication Should Be 27-28 L1 OR NOT?: Mixing it Up: 7 Ways to Ensure Against L1 Enclaves Among ESL Students 29-30 L1 OR NOT?: Don’t Close the Door on L1: 4 Ways Your Students’ First Language Can Help Them Learn English 31 ALL SKILLS: Cover All Four Skills With This Simple, 4-Step Activity Your Students Will Love 32-33 ALL SKILLS: Crime and Punishment: 5 Integrated Exercises for ESL Students 34-35 AMBIGUITY: What Do You Want Us to Do, Exactly? Tolerance of Ambiguity and Lack Thereof in Students 36-37 TELEVISION: Should You Have Television in Class? 6 Reasons You Should Turn on the TV (and How to Make It Productive for Your Students) 38 SMARTPHONES: Don’t Throw That Smart Phone out the Window! 7 Spiffy Ways to Use Technology to HELP ESL Students Learn 39-40 DIVERSITY: My Country, Right or Wrong: Five Ways of Understanding Nationalism in the ESL Classroom 41 DIVERSITY: A Rainbow of Cultures – 7 Steps to Organizing an International Day 42-43 ADULT LEARNERS: 9 Reasons Why Games with Adult Learners are a Must 44-45 ADULT LEARNERS: 7 Proven Ways to Teach the ABC to Adults 46-47 INDIVIDUAL LEARNERS: Teaching ESL in an Individual Tutoring Setting: Keeping the Student Awake and Involved 48-49 INDIVIDUAL LEARNERS: Teaching One-on-One: A Teacher’s Dream of Individualizing and Building Curriculum 50-51 INDIVIDUAL LEARNERS: When They Just Want to Pass: 12 Dos and Don’ts for the One-on-One ESL Tutor 52-53 ONLINE LEARNERS: How Do I Even Do That? Principles of Teaching ESL Online 54-55 ONLINE LEARNERS: Teaching ESL Online: Pros and Cons 56 ONLINE LEARNERS: Engaging Virtual Lessons: 5 Great Techniques that Will Change Your Online Lessons 57-58 ONLINE LEARNERS: Teaching on Skype©: Essential Guide of Dos and Don’ts 59 ONLINE LEARNERS: Teaching Remotely: Use These 7 Tips for Teaching by Skype and You Can’t Go Wrong 60-61 CLASSROOM CRIME SCENE: Language Cops in the Classroom? How to Set up a Classroom Crime Scene and 8 Language Activities You Can Do with It 62-63 ERROR CORRECTION: Being Wrong Is The Best Thing That Can Happen: 8 Methods for Compassionate Error Correction 64-65 FLUENCY: ‘Just a Minute’: 5 Steps to Making Fluency Fun
3 4 Simple Retention Tricks That Will Help Your Students Remember IMAGINE A PYRAMID. At the bottom are all the students who kind of get it, who remember some infor- mation from class. At the top of the pyra- mid are those few students who seem to retain almost everything that they learn in class. And at the bottom and at the top, along with their students, are the teachers who have these students in class. Some are less effective and some more effective, as their students’ perfor- mance shows. Every teacher falls on the pyramid somewhere, even you. But before you settle in and get comfortable at any of the lower levels, see how easy it is to get to the top and be a teacher whose students achieve amazing re- sults in their English classes. HELP YOUR STUDENTS BECOME AMAZINGLY SUCCESSFUL LEARNERS 1 THE BASICS Students retain twenty percent of what they hear. It’s not very impressive. And for English as a second language learners, the percentage is even lower. The language barrier factors in at nearly every level, and a student’s listening comprehension skills and knowledge of vocabulary will, generally, negatively af- fect how much of what he hears he is able to retain. The good news is it’s simple to move students up from this meager twenty percent retention. Getting students in- volved in the learning process, things you probably do every day in your ESL class, will increase how much they re- tain. One way to improve students’ listening comprehension is to give them as many different opportunities to practice as pos- sible. This includes bringing multimedia into your classroom – tape recordings and podcasts for example. Show them videos of people giving speeches, and bring guest speakers into your class- room. Even inviting another teacher to come and talk to your students will help them improve their listening compre- hension since different people speak with different vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. The good news is that all these things work to improve listening comprehension. The bad news is that even students with the best listening comprehension will only retain around twenty percent of what they hear. But we’re not to the top of the pyramid yet. 2 MOVING UP THE LADDER Take a step up. “Oh, I’ll just read it in the book.” Books may contain a great amount of information whether you are studying English or entomology, but that doesn’t mean they are the best source for learning. According to re- search in education, students generally remember about thirty percent of what they see. This includes reading books, looking at graphics, and any other pro- cess that involves only the eyes and the brain. A lot of ESL students prefer read- ing information to attending class. Per- haps it is because they can take their time and look up words that are unfamil- iar to them. They think that working at their own pace, even if it’s only through visual means, will help them learn Eng- lish better. Even with this extra atten- tion to learning, however, most of them will not retain all the information on the page, only about thirty percent. It’s important for teachers to remember this. Sometimes the best option for your class seems to be independent work, something reading based. And those kinds of activities are not bad. But it does matter how and when you use them. These independent reading based ac- tivities are best as review of informa- tion rather than a means of presenting new information. When students read information they already know, it will in- crease retention. When they read new material as their only means of learning it, their retention is less than ideal. 3 A COMMON HOLDING PATTERN Very few ESL teachers either present a lesson orally or have students read about it in a text or from a worksheet. Most teachers, no matter what the sub- ject, have figured out that doing both – presenting information orally and visu- ally – gives their students more success when it comes to retaining information. Research supports this conclusion, and they move up to the next level of the pyramid. If student see and hear the same information, they will retain approximately fifty percent of that infor- mation. That’s why we teachers write on the board while we are teaching stu- dents. It gives a double punch of input. That double input almost doubles how much students remember of what they have read and heard. Here on the level of hearing and seeing, most students become comfortable, and teachers can, too. But it’s so easy to keep going up, why stop there. 4 A LITTLE CHANGE MAKES A BIG DIFFERENCE Yes, remembering fifty percent of what we present in class is probably a pretty good result, but with just a little change, we can help our students become even more successful. Just taking one oth- er small step in a lesson will increase student comprehension to a stunning seventy percent. Let your students talk. That’s the big factor – speaking. Tra- ditional classroom teachers may balk at the idea, but as ESL teachers, part of our job is to get students speaking English. As a result, talking in class is always a good thing. Well, most of the time it is. And research shows that stu- dents generally retain about seventy percent of what they hear, see, and say in class. That means all those small group discussions are great not only for pronunciation work, but also for helping students remember information in gram- mar class, vocabulary class, and writing class. I’m not espousing chanting verb conjugations as a way to improve stu- dent comprehension, but think about adding simple activities such as these to your class: give students a jigsaw in reading class so each person must orally communicate his information to his group. Have students interview each other while using a new grammar con- struction. Play a game of cards to teach
4 vocabulary (memory, go fish, etc.) and have students read the matches they make before setting their cards aside. Let students read instructions and answers aloud when they are completing a worksheet, even if it’s only with one or two other students. These simple things will make a differ- ence in how much your students learn and how well they learn it. 5 REACHING THE TOP Who would complain if their stu- dents remembered seventy percent of what they taught in class? But you don’t have to stop there. Your students can achieve approximately ninety per- cent retention with just one more step in the teaching/learning process: do- ing. Doing can mean a lot of different things, and there are probably as many interpretations of that word as there are teachers in the world. I like to think of doing in terms of kinesthetic learn- ers – students who need to get their hands involved when they are learn- ing. Though they may do okay with listening, reading, and even speaking, if they can handle and move objects, build things, draw things, have objects in their control that relate to the les- son, they soar. Because only a small number of students in your class are probably kinesthetic learners, it might seem like you are misusing your all too short class time to include hands on activities in every lesson, but you aren’t. Even aural and visual learners will benefit from kinesthetic activities in class. WHEN YOU BOIL IT ALL DOWN, ONLY OUR STUDENTS CAN ENSURE THEIR OWN SUCCESS IN LEARNING ENGLISH. But by including aural, visual, speak- ing, and doing activities into our les- son plans, we can make a difference in how well and how easily our stu- dents learn. And when we do, we can be assured we have given them the best chance they have to succeed.

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