Effective Classroom Management and Language Teaching Techniques
3) How to Manage Teaching and Learning?
Physical Presence: IT plays a significant role in managing the classroom environment.
- Proximity: Distance can be a sign of coldness. Teachers have to consider how close students want them to be.
- Appropriacy: The way in which teachers sit or stand in the classroom can influence student engagement. Teachers need to decide how closely they will work with students.
- Movement: How much teachers move around the classroom will depend on their personal style. Some teachers prefer to stay in one place, while others walk around.
- Contact: It is impossible to help students without making contact with them. Teachers have to be aware of what students are doing and feeling.
The teacher’s physical approach and personality in the class are important aspects of classroom management to consider.
Voice in Class: How we speak and what our voice sounds like have a crucial impact on the class.
- Audibility: Teachers need to be audible. A balance between audibility and volume is essential.
- Variety: It’s important to vary the quality of the teacher’s voice and the volume at which they speak.
- Conservation: Teachers need to take great care of their voices by breathing correctly and avoiding shouting.
Stages of a Lesson: When teachers arrive in the classroom, they need to start the lesson with a clear beginning to get the students’ attention. The lesson should also have a clear ending with a summary of the class, a game, or homework.
Seating Arrangement:
- Orderly Rows: Teachers can work with the whole class when students sit in rows. Teachers have a clear view of all students, and students can all see the teacher. (e.g., watching a video, language practice)
- Circles and Horseshoes: These arrangements are suitable for smaller classes. The teacher appears to be more of a collaborator and less dominating in these settings. This arrangement allows students to share feelings and information more easily.
- Separate Tables: Students sit in small groups at individual tables, and the teacher walks around helping them. However, teaching can be more difficult because students are more spread out.
Student Grouping:
- Whole Class: In many situations, this is the best type of classroom organization because students are focusing on the teacher.
- Groupwork and Pairwork: These are cooperative activities that encourage student participation. Students discuss a topic, do a role-play, or solve a problem together.
- Pairwork: Students work in pairs and may be more engaged in the activity than if the teacher was working with the whole class, where only one student talks at a time.
- Solo work: This allows students to consider their own individual needs and progress.
4) How to Describe Learning and Teaching?
Language Learning (Outside the Classroom):
- Children who are exposed to language will normally learn it.
- Adults can learn a language without formally studying it, but they may have more problems with pronunciation and grammar than younger learners.
Both children and adults acquire language outside the classroom and share similarities in learning:
- They are exposed to the language, which they more or less understand, even if they can’t produce the same language.
- They are motivated to learn in order to be able to communicate.
- They use the language they are learning, checking their own progress and abilities.
Elements Necessary for Successful Language Learning (Inside the Classroom):
Students are “picking up” the language (acquiring it for the first time). The ESA elements will be present in class.
- Engage: Teachers try to arouse students’ interest by involving their emotions. To avoid boredom, teachers should provide lessons where students are amused, moved, stimulated, or challenged. Activities that teachers can use include games, music, stories, and pictures.
- Study: Students are asked to focus on the language and how it is constructed. Teachers can explain grammar explicitly, or students can discover grammar for themselves. They can work in groups, read a text, or learn vocabulary. The construction of language is the main focus.
- Activate: This involves exercises and activities designed to get students to use any or all of the language they know to communicate as much as they can with little or no restriction. They need to practice in the classroom. Activities include role-plays, designing advertisements, debates and discussions, and poem writing.
Engage students in lessons by tapping into their interests. Study activities focus on the language. Then, activate students by having them use the language in real-life situations.
Sometimes we need to change things up to avoid boring our students.
Models of Teaching Practice:
- Grammar Translation: By analyzing grammar and finding equivalents between the students’ native language and the language being studied, students will learn how the foreign language is constructed. This is a traditional technique used for many years.
- Audio-Lingualism: Audio-lingual classes focused on language repetition drills, hoping that students would acquire good language habits, including rules and constructions.
- PPP (Presentation, Practice, Production): Similar to ESA, the teacher presents the context and situation for the language (e.g., describing a robot) and both explains and demonstrates the meaning and form of the new language (e.g., can/can’t). This is extremely effective for teaching simple language at lower levels.
- Task-Based Learning: This is based on the belief that students may learn more effectively when their minds are focused on the task rather than on the language they are using.
- Communicative Language Teaching: This approach makes use of real-life situations that necessitate communication, similar to what students might encounter in real life.
In the film “Mona Lisa Smile,” Katherine Watson, the new teacher at a women’s university, tries to show her students a different way of learning and living. As Jeremy Harmer (1998) states, “Good learners, in other words, don’t just wait to be taught”… the students’ way of learning in this film is just memorizing everything without being critical or reflecting upon what they have been taught. At first, the teacher is surprised by the students’ knowledge, but then, when she changes her teaching methods, she realizes that the students have a very conservative and traditional view. To sum up, in terms of motivation, the teacher constantly tries to provoke interest by showing them big pictures and encouraging them to look beyond. While at first they were reluctant, the students eventually start to understand the teacher’s way of perceiving art and life.