ESL Teaching

Creativity in teaching takes much time for preliminary preparation and requires good managerial skills and psychology knowledge. So ESL teachers should be ready to study their students first in order to prepare proper and effective creative tasks and techniques. As language teaching involves all its four aspects such as speaking, writing, reading and listening, it would be better for ESL teachers to divide the term year into five parts where each of the language aspects can be practiced and at last all of them can be applied simultaneously.

To start with, reading lessons should be practiced. There are some creative techniques for reading which can be applied in general. For example, an ESL teacher may hand his students out sheets of papers with the same story which differs a little for each paper (e.g. different names, characters, words, phrases or tenses for each paper). Then a teacher reads his copy and asks students to stop him when there is a difference in their papers. Students should read out their variants, correct them according to the teacher’s and read the correct version in final. Such readings can be developed into discussions later when all students should define which version seems the best one.

The next aspect to be practiced can be at listening lessons. I know the practice of ‘listen and correct the mistakes’ is a very good practice. Here the students are given the text which differs slightly from the record. They are to listen and find the differences, then correct them in their texts. Each student should then read his corrected text aloud while other students are listening to him and add their own corrections if there are any. Students should determine themselves whose corrections were the most appropriate. Here bonuses are very useful!

There are tens of effective creative writing tasks. For example some ESL teachers encourage their students to write by providing competitions for the best journalist, poet or writer. They keep a basket in a class for students’ works: students may drop their articles, poems and stories there at any time they want. Topics are not assigned and students may writer whatever they want about. Another creative writing task is to write up a story together in a class when each student should invent one sentence to add to the whole story. Here the topic may be given by a teacher or created by students.

Speaking opens hundreds of opportunities to make teaching creative and funny. Make your students actors who can change their roles, characters, places and centuries at any time. Make the students who are spectators guess which character or century is presented. Be an actor your self! Encourage your students to speak, make provoking tasks during your lessons, say you do not understand the language other than English!