Teaching English Through English Made Easy

Feeling intimidated and horrified about the upcoming demonstration class with TETE? No worries. With some ready-made activity ideas, visual aids, and activity scripts, along with the demo videos, you’ll be good to go in no time.

 

This wild idea emerged after I kept asking myself this question: How can I help more fellow English teachers embrace this inevitable trend and actually want to give it a try in class? Well, one can attend as many workshops but at the end of the day, he or she has to conduct a class in English by speaking English. To speak English fluently and confidently takes lots of effort and doesn’t happen overnight.

 

However, if textbook publishers were to create effective teaching resources, not those unattractive and inconvenient to use, all I have to do is use those activities with my students step by step. This way, not only would I demonstrate my capabilities of TETE, but my students would have more authentic English input and speak more English as well. With this goal in mind, I said yes to HanLin’s offer and made the most of the following ingredients:

 

1.    The CAT  

To do a TETE demo class, it’s not about showing off your English if your students don’t understand what you’re saying at all. You don’t want to overwhelm them with all the grammatical jargon, either. So, the rule of thumb is making it COMPREHENSIBLE. Pay attention to your choice of words and the pace of your speech.

Right off the bat, I’ll make students feel relaxed and motivated to participate in the warm-up activities. They’d be worried about this class at first but gradually be more willing to answer my questions because the basic tone of the class has been set: this class seems to be ATTRACTIVE.

You don’t want to lecture throughout the whole class. It’d be a disaster because there is going to be full of dead silence and awkward moments. So, I enjoy all the TASK-BASED activities to keep my students busy producing the desired results collaboratively, like talking to each other, writing something down on the mini board, and sharing their ideas.

 

2.    Mini Lecture + Interactive Activity   

I can’t really emphasize enough how this combination works wonders for my workshops as well as demo classes. Keep your lectures short, say 5 to 7 minutes. Right after each lecture, engage your students with an activity, a task, or a game, as long as they will be working in groups to DO something with English.

While lecturing, I’ll still try not to give straightforward bullet points for them to memorize or take notes with. Instead, I’ll elicit what they need to know with some guided questions.

Most of my activity ideas come from the Task-based Learning approach, such as matching, ranking, listing, etc. Recently, I’ve noticed a buzzword, Gamification, circulating a lot in English-teaching groups on Facebook. Been using some games, like Two Truths and a Lie, Who’s Got What, Find Someone Who, and so on, so I’ll be exploring gamification more in the future.

 

3.    Connecting the Dots  

What’d be a better way to end a demo class than by having your students present the assigned topic in English? To make this happen, I ask myself: Under what condition or with how much scaffolding do I make sure that my students can produce the END PRODUCT? What do I have to do first before making this task possible?

Backward Design is the answer. Visualize the end product first, and then work step-by-step backwards to come up with activity ideas that can build up to the next task. A great example would be one of my demo classes: When Lantern Meets English.

 

After this workshop, I became more confident to share TETE or EMI at workshops because I knew I’d be able to help more teachers this way. Based on the workshop participants’ responses and feedback, I knew this was a very successful one though I couldn’t cover all key elements due to the time limit. Well, I’ll be providing these plug-and-play activity ideas, slides, scripts, and demo videos in the upcoming workshops anyway.  

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