Everything I Know About Teaching ESL, Part 1: Know Your Audience

Captive audience via peruisay

Within a week of arriving in China I was teaching my first class, an hourlong "fun" lesson offered as a perk to students already signed up for normal courses. The topic was up to me. I wouldn't know the ability or exact ages of the kids ahead of time (anywhere from six to thirteen, which is a huge spectrum), and I was terrified. Before I came to China I had almost no experience with kids, especially not the Chinese kind; I didn't know how to talk to them, what they were interested in, what they needed to learn. I quick skimmed a few books on teaching theory, making note of different styles of teaching and lesson planning, possible games to play, things to watch for in students. I spent an hour prepping for the class, although one book specifically mentioned such a time investment is a waste of time. I had two full pages of notes and activities suggested by other teachers.

Needless to say, I bombed. The kids were all over the place; one near-fluent eleven year old was sitting next to a six-year-old who couldn't remember his colors. I ran out of my carefully prepared material within the first fifteen minutes before leaving (running out of) the classroom to catch my breath and begging anyone and everyone in the teachers' office- staff, students, desks, the ether- for ideas to fill the rest of the time.

Many of my first classes went this way. Students staring, doodling. Assistants looking at me with "Where did they dig up this fucking foreigner?" looks on their faces. The whispering in Chinese made me paranoid. The stench of boredom followed me from classroom to classroom. I thought I knew what I wanted to teach (English, of course), but I had no idea where to start.

The solution came in a short introduction to teaching written by a colleague: "Problem- Students don't find the class interesting. Solution- Be more interesting."

This presented its own problems in that I in no way considered anything I had to offer interesting. I'm naturally shy around strangers. I have completely alien musical tastes, especially compared to Chinese students. I like talking about beer, writing, traveling and sports, none of which merited more than two minutes worth of discussion with the students, and I lack the ability to be the nonstop laugh factory (see: dancing clown) to keep a class entertained for an hour or two hours a pop. I did, however, have two things going for me: an earnest desire to succeed in my job by improving the English of my students and a willingness to listen to advice and try anything.

Eventually, I came up with a simple method that I use to plan all of my classes: find out what interests your students and find a way to tie it to your language goals for the class.

Replace "interests" with "motivates," take out "language" entirely and this applies to almost every area of teaching. Motivation varies depending on the type of institution and subject you teach; from kindergarten through post-graduate, the basic motivating factor is the end of term grade, but most good teachers will recognize the limits of testable knowledge and push students further with different carrots and sticks. Teaching at a private training center poses its own unique challenges, as any grade I present has no practical effect on the students; even if I wanted to fail a kid, it's in the school's financial interests to have them continue on to the next level. Like it or not, I'm stuck with the bad kids as much as I am with the good ones, so as a teacher I have to make sure they all learn. Learning for the sake of learning is great, but giving students a sense that what they're learning matters pushes them beyond their boundaries.

I rarely use "sticks" when I'm teaching, and usually only as a way to control disruptive students or unacceptable behavior. Carrots can be anything from stickers for little kids to the promise of pizza for an older class that does its homework. I've bribed kids with pennies or little toys; some teachers I know pass out Monopoly money in class and hold end-of-term auctions for various prizes.

But the most effective teaching comes when you can make learning itself the carrot, and hoo-boy is that a challenge. Most of my students are effectively forced to attend English class by their parents or bosses or schools, but I think this still applies no matter the subject, level or school, and it's where knowing your audience comes into play big-time.

Grade-school age kids are smart enough to make and get jokes, but young enough not to really question the "why" of what they're doing. If it's fun, they like it. If it's boring, they doodle, or talk to their friends, or put their mind somewhere else, in elaborate daydreams playing out in the textures of the floor. They respond well to positive peer-pressure (knowing the difference between positive and negative peer-pressure comes with experience and learning your students' native language; I laid off on making too many jokes about the students themselves until I knew what they were comfortable with), and you don't have to have a sophisticated sense of humor to keep them entertained. I also try to layer my jokes as a reward for the students who are more capable and/or paying attention to what I'm saying (For example: I happened to have a student in one of my classes whose English name is Candy when I was teaching a unit about shopping. "Where can I buy candy?" I ask. "At CANDY store," they all reply in unison, laughing hysterically, even poor Candy. Lame? Sure, but I've been doing this for a year and the joke still isn't stale). Most challenging is finding a balance between what's entertaining and what you want the kids to learn, and that can only come with experience and varies from class to class.

Middle school and high school kids are different, of course. As a whole, they're generally more informed and better able to make actual conversation, but also imbued with apathy, sarcasm and (healthy) skepticism. Their interests and social interactions are much more varied and complicated. Earning their trust can be difficult, but if affords you a much more straightforward approach. Be honest with them. Try and find out what they like, and gather teaching materials that genuinely hold their interest. Textbooks at this age level present a good guideline for what to teach, but they're usually authored by a person who had a vague grasp of what teenagers liked five or ten years before; if you took a foreign language in high school, you probably had books like this. Once you engage the kids in conversation, the hard part for this age level is tying it to your language goal; free-talking is fine practice, but it doesn't really build to anything. But make the "teaching" part of your lesson too obvious and you'll lose them. This doesn't mean you have to dumb down your lesson or pretend that you're just like them (you're not), but just be mindful that just because the students are talking doesn't mean your lesson has a point.

Every student is different, obviously. Many adults have years of English under their belts and just need a forum to use it, while kindergarten kids need a much more structured environment filled with bright colors, songs and games. Students learn in thirty-seven different ways. But find what interests them and teaching gets a lot easier.

One last thing. Lacking specific metrics can be discouraging for a teacher who genuinely wants to be good at their job, so it's important to identify your language goals as soon as possible: yours, those of your students and those of their parents, and not necessarily in that order. I do this in a number of ways, and of course it varies by class and teacher. Student retention is big for me; like it or not, the parents are the primary customers of the school and it's my job to satisfy their expectations. I always try to find a way to get my students to show off what they've learned without applying too much pressure, usually in open classes or parent meetings. Measuring improvement from quiz to quiz or exam to exam is helpful, but so is catching up with students if I see them outside of class. If a student is studying for a specific test, I try to follow up with them and see if their performance matched their expectations. The ultimate payoff is both personal and professional and lends credibility to why people choose this career in the first place.

My greatest moment came at an end-of-term parents meeting for a class comprised of seven to eleven-year-olds. I looked through our text book and wrote twenty or so random vocabulary words on the white board. I did a quick drill of some of the sentence patterns and told the kids that I'd point at a word and it was their job to give me a beautiful sentence. Everyone's hand shot up and the parents stared in awe as their kids, even the quiet, shy ones, one-upped each other for twenty glorious minutes at the mere quiver of my index finger. They all signed up for the next book. I've never had so much fun at a job.