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Excellent book which communicates ideas for every type of teaching. This book is a must for anyone who wishes to teach the English language
Required to read this book for a language school in Prague. Wealth of information so far.
But if the students are ambitious, they're going to want to move beyond mere communication of basic needs and substandard speech is going to hold them back. They feel that English is English.
But you have to start somewhere and this book gives a pretty good general overview of how to go about it. I think it could also help the prospective teacher avoid a lot of pitfalls.
Of course, the only way one really learns to teach English is by actually doing it. But most of my classmates and my professor disagreed with me.
My main objection to it is that it's British, with British grammatical usage, British spellings, and British sensibilities. I personally found the DVD a bit disturbing because the teachers had substandard pronunciation.
Maybe that's okay if the students are going to stay in one location and always work at lower level jobs. But if that doesn't bother you, you may find that this book will suit your needs.
This is one of the books supplied when registering for the 60 hour Oxford Seminar Teaching ESL/EFL 3 weekend class. The whole seminar is $995, but $100 off with a 4 week advance registration.Influenced by the class, I don't see the text as being totally stand alone, even if the quality is exceptionally high. There is another commercial text on Overseas Jobs, plus a large O.S. proprietary bound text and a much smaller stappled text for job location. However, I liked the O.S. approach so much that I am adding a supplementary 40 hour module for TOEFL for $300.
I only gave the text 3 stars because I think that the middle chapters, which specifically concern teaching English (the topic of the book)., could have more information in them. (For example, do you really need a book to tell you that people need to be exposed to language in different ways. I breezed through them because, minus the examples which I mentioned above, there is not that much information in them. "What if the students are at different levels.What if the class is very big.What if the students don't want to talk.")As are the first few chapters about how to be a teacher in general.
Yes, it has some good tips, but I don't feel like I have a better understanding of how people learn languages. Frankly, I am surprised at the great ratings this book has received. Traditional grammar practice is fine, but a student needs to be engaged in the language through other forms of practice. So therefor if you are only teaching one level, 80% of the chapter is useless to you).
I do think that some of his more advanced examples could be "dumbed down" for beginner audiences, but he could have had more examples in some chapters. i.e. Duh). If anything this book reassured some thoughts I have had about how to teach. I will soon be a first time ESL teacher.
Also, I was annoyed that he dropped the "Beginner" examples in a couple of chapters. I liked those examples, because I will be teaching young children. The "What If" chapter is useful. (i.e. But as I said, nothing in them was terribly enlightening. A lot of it seemed like it was common sense. He gives good tips on how to speak in class, how to relate to students, lesson plans, how to give instructions, etc.
I liked how he seperated the chapters into "How to teach Reading" or "How to Teach Listening, Writing." etc. (90% of the chapters are examples based on the student's level. I believe that this was the best part of the book. You should read this book along with a more indepth study of teaching ESL.
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