ESL Teaching in this Age of Coronavirus

from pixabay.com Photograher: weisanjiang

Schools are closing worldwide. While some remain open, they need to take cautious steps to stay diseased free. For the other learning establishments, they are left wondering what to do now. We all realized that being on house locked down is not a forced vacation and learning still needs to be done.

So, what to do? The following is advice for schools who are closed/closing and for those who are still open.

We're Open

First of all, if you are in an area that has reported cases of the disease, you are on borrowed time. There is no telling when you will be pushed to close. Use this time to train your students, how to self-study. Show them how to review sections of their textbook or worksheets, by writing vocabulary from these parts and making dialogue/sentences with them. Practice grammar the same way or write drills like,

Example: (Write on the board)	Students’ Answers:
Present Continuous Verb: take       (+) Affirmative: She        (-) Negative:         (?) Question:       Short Answer:	(+) Affirmative: She is taking a pen.              (-) Negative: She isn’t taking a pen.              (?) Question: Is she taking a pen?  Short Answer: Yes, she is. / No, she isn’t

Also, take some preventive measures:

- Spray some hand sanitizer in every students' hands as they enter the classroom.

- Have students sit in rows to limit contact.

- Use online games where students shout out or use hand gestures to give their answers. (Example: Using the multiple-choice in a game from eslgamplus.com, students put up one finger for the first option, two for the second option and so on.)

-Instruct students to cough into their elbow, not their hands and don't let them go to the toilet, except for an emergency. And always have them wash their hands afterward, adding a spray of purell before they come back to class.

-More writing and independent practice need to be incorporated into your lesson plan.

-Speaking practice should have students a foot away from each other.

- Encourage elbow taps when they wanted to say a good job to other classmates or take on the "Demolition Man" hand clap

Yes, we have reached this level. No matter how silly it may seem. It keeps us safe.

Closed Down

School closure makes learning suffer. But some things can be done about it. You don't want students to come back as if its the first day of school with 3 months of summer wiping out their memory of English. Remember if you don't use it, you lose it. So here are some ideas to help homeschool students during this difficult time in our history.

-set up a Google Drive account. Email parents the link when you have placed videos, worksheets or scanned page assignments on it. Have students scan or take pictures of their work to email to you.

-transition your class into online teaching. There are many platforms to broadcast an online course. Here are some free ones:
           *Moodle
           *Zoom
           *Udemy
           *Rcampus
           *Peer 2 Peer University
           *Thinkific
           *Teachers Pay Teachers
           *Google Hangouts
           *Google Classroom


- you could even set up a YouTube channel for lectures or links to other videos to teach learning points in your lesson.

It will take from half a week to a week to set up and get familiar with the system but once that hard part is done, it's easy sailing.

Either way, in this day in age, there is no excuse not to continue teaching. A good teacher knows when to adapt. So, with the right preparation and attitude, you can make this temporary crisis not completely stop our way of life. Get out online and teach those students English!

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Let me know how it goes. Write a comment about your experience with planning and/or what happened when you tried my method.

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My Ideal Lesson Plan

from pixabay.com. Photographer: Pexels

Lesson planning is an unpaid piece of your free time that comes with teaching. And it's not like you can't have a plan when those kids show up. What are you gonna do with them for an hour or more? You can't play games for the whole period. Even young learners will get bored after a while. 

There is nothing more nerve-wracking than thinking from the top of your head for what to do while trying to manage a class of young people. 

You got little Mario out of his seat again. Cindy Lou and Sara are marking each other's paper with scriggly marks. Adrian is insulting Marcos. Little Tina is asking to go to the restroom. Now, you have five other kids who have decided to go to the restroom. Paco keeps pulling on your shirt asking what he should be doing next. It's hell.

from pixabay.com. Artist: Jordan Dreyer

Have a plan. Have a plan. have a plan. If you end up changing it, fine. But always have something to fall back on.

Anyways, having a plan can consume a lot of your time, especially when you first start out teaching. Planning takes experience as well as knowing your students and the material. You need to know: what they can do; what they need support in completing; how long it takes them to do certain activities; and what things they like to do. If you have a plan for teaching a song in class with singing and dancing but your students hate dancing and/ or singing, that's gonna be the longest 3 minutes of your life. 3 minutes when it should have taken 10!

from pixabay.com. Photographer: nastya_gepp

So you have to plan. I've heard horror stories of teachers planning every day from anywhere from 2 -4 hours a day! Why!?! Who has that much time!?! And you're doing it for free. 

I have kids, other interests and a household to run. I don't have 2-3 hours daily for planning. And if I did, I wouldn't want to be planning in the same amount of time to teach it. You probably don't want the same either.

Let me help you change all that in less time. With the plan below, it takes me an hour per week to completely plan my lesson for the next week. I do spend some time gathering material to photocopy. And as an extra measure, every morning I go over the plan for that day's class to make sure it works and I have what I need for it. But this takes about 10 to 20 minutes. So you are looking altogether at about less than 3 hours a week that I spend on lesson planning.

It's effective. Efficient. And less of your free time taken up.

Regardless of the experience you have or don't have, here is a lesson structure for all levels that will make your planning faster.

The Plan:
Time in an hour class	Activity
5 to 15 minutes	Review (This could be simple exercises from the last grammar point you have covered in class. Or vocabulary connected to the lesson that you have seen before. Or drilling. I usually use workbook material not used in previous lessons or I take exercises from webpages that we had not completed. Either way, the key here is revising. So don't show them anything new in content and style.)
16 to 18 minutes	Lead-in to book/ lesson activity (Sign up to my weekly newsletter to get tips on different lead-ins)
17 to 37 minutes	Book content (Don't have a book? Use whatever resources you have to present and teach the learning objective)
38 to 52 minutes	Workbook/Practice worksheets  (This time is used to practice the aim of the lesson.)
*Note: Fun activities can be mixed into the presenting and/or completion of the book content and workbook practice
53 to 54 minutes	Students pack up
55 to 60 minutes	Game Time (Hopefully something connected to what they did today. But if not, have it related to previously taught topics/grammar)

It's that simple. 

Keep in mind that you will incorporate lead-ins for every transition into a new activity. They can be as basic as a pair discussion about the topic, describing the picture in the text, pre-reading using the title or a list race. (A list race is where students have a certain allotment of time to write down as many words as they can which group in the topic you have given them. Example: The topic is food. So they write banana, pear, etc.) More lead-in ideas are available in the weekly newsletter. Click to join.

Keep this as your routine. Modify it by adding exam practice during workbook time for exam students. Or if you have a class longer than an hour, add testing strategies for listening and speaking. Moreover, be sure to place a break in the middle of a long class session for a 5-minute game, instead of at the end. This will help reboot the students so their eyes are not glazing over towards the end of the period.

Try planning this way and see how long it takes you. You'll be surprised at how refreshed you will become when you get your free time back during the workweek.  

Let me know how it goes. Write a comment about your experience with planning and/or what happened when you tried my method.

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A Change of Plan: From Worksheets to Exciting Learning

In teaching, you learn quickly that no plan goes accordingly. You could have an airtight lesson plan filled with objectives and clever transitional steps leading you to the next activity. Of course, you've planned brilliantly! It's what we had to spend a month to a year training to do. Yet, life always finds a way to wreak havoc on your plans. Especially, when dealing with human nature (specifically young children and teenagers. They have their own agenda.)

When you plan is failing.

For you, maybe, students have a very weak awareness of the past participle verbs during your present perfect lesson. Or a good chunk of students have missed lessons and you have to update the others to carry on to the next unit. 

Or worse, the internet shuts off. The computer decides to have a rest day and you are unable to use the tips and materials I have for you here. Ultimately, a complete nightmare with 13 to 25 students staring at you for instructions into what to do next.

Either way, disaster is known to strike. So prepare for the worst and pray for the best.

If you can't get anything to work out the way you've planned, its time to channel your creative flexibility.

As such, teachers must learn two things: when to divert from the plan and how to create an effective learning activity. Thus, welcome to my segment: A Change of Plan.

This week, during my movers' class, I had planned to finish the grammar point for the infinitive of purpose. 

I had been using the book exercises to lead students into an alternative way of giving a reason to do something. Example: I went to the bookshop to buy a book. 

The energy in the room was dropping and there was a clear division in who understood it, who got the grammar yet came up with unclear content (I had one student say: "I look in the dictionary to play football". The grammar is right even though it made no sense.🤷🏾‍♀️) and I had students who were completely lost. So instead of my original plan to have a mountain of more worksheets. I changed it up.

First, I wrote on the board: "I go to school to..." Then, I elicit phrases to complete the sentence. We stayed with "I go to school to learn more things." Next, I took the last phrase to create a new sentence. "I learn new things to..." I pointed to a student to complete the sentence. Then I used her last phrase to create a new sentence for the student next to her to complete.

A chain was developing and I went around the class following that chain format. Some sentences were crazy ideas but it didn't matter I was trying to get the structure down. In this way, I could fix the mistakes certain students kept making and they were getting models of corrected phrases from their peers.

At this point, the students had verbally practiced it with a good amount of success. They were getting it but they needed more exposure to the grammar and making the content connect. 

The next step was writing relays. Writing relays work with students sitting in rows of 4 or 5. The first person in each row copies and completes the sentence I provide for them. Once done they pass their notebook back and the second person writes a new sentence with the last phrase of the previous sentence. What we had done in our chain format. 

When the last person in the row completes it, I check for grammar and reasoning. If any of those mistakes are there, I underlined them. Then I'd hand it back and tell the group to get together and fix it. 

This does three things: trains students how to self- correct, peer teaching is established (classmates explain the process in their young folk language) and this process also gives others a chance to finish, in hopes I will see theirs before the other group fixes their mistakes.

The point goes to the team that has completed all their sentences correctly before the other teams. Once that round is done, I point out the mistakes the other groups were unable to fix. I do three rounds of this. And the team with the most points win.

Now, the class needs to settle and I have to access if any of these activities have worked by doing independent practice. So, I give them a couple of exercises. 

I monitor and support the weaker ones. Through my encouragement guidance, I remind them of some example phrases. And with patience, they complete the task. Their ideas are unconventional but the structure is there. 

Plus, I feel confident to move to the next unit for the following class but I've noted that this grammar will need to be revised in warm-up exercises in the future. this way the students don't forget it and it will improve their concept of how the relationship of purpose should be between the two clauses.

This particular class ended on a good note. And, with creative learning tools from my teacher's toolbox, the aim of my lesson objective was met, regardless that the plan had changed.

And if you like to know about some more FREE opportunities, sign up for our FREE newsletter and get monthly updates by email about: 

• *find out which new worksheets, lesson plans, craft sheets, flashcards, games, tips and so on have been added to https://forteachingesl.blogspot.com/  

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• *ESL teaching tips and ideas about teens and kids.  
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• *materials and resources  
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• *promotions and offers on resource books 
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