ELT+Technique+1+by+BÜŞRA+ELMAS

ELT TECHNIQUE 1 BY BÜŞRA ELMAS
The key to English Language Teaching, or ELT, is getting students to care. If they can apply what the teacher is teaching to their lives, they'll remember it. An apathetic student is not a learning student. Introduce new techniques to bring your lessons to life. So, teachers should apply four crucial topics; student as teacher, interviewing native speakers, pantomime, and pictures.

Firstly, in student as teacher topic each student teach about his culture. Many students enjoy the role reversal of being the authority figure. A shy student will feel more comfortable talking about something he knows. Assign a familiar topic, like preparing a traditional meal or describing the job the student held in his native country.

Secondly, in interviewing native speakers, intermediate and advanced students write questions and ask them of native English speakers. Interviews help the students practice realistic conversation skills. They'll encounter new accents and speech patterns in a structured fashion. Such social, interactive assignments help make students aware of informal speech and context cues.

Thirdly, in pantomime the teacher acts things out -- keeping in his/her mind that acting ability doesn't matter. In fact, bad acting is good because it's funny. If the students laugh, they'll remember what you're teaching. The teacher should bring in props, either real items or plastic toys. Not every student is an auditory or visual learner. Some students learn best using total physical response (TPR) method, so asking such students to act things out or to draw on the board, and letting the rest of the class guess the topic or word will be helpful for handling the class.

Lastly, in Picturestopic, The teacher checks online search engines and junk mail catalogs for photos of common items. Images give instant understanding. They're also useful for vocabulary quizzes. The teacher should mount them on cards or laminate them to minimize wear and tear. Store the picture collection in a "go-to box" and keep it handy in the classroom. This box is also a good place to keep fillers, such as games, TPR exercises and speaking activities that practice grammar or vocabulary, to pull out if a lesson goes faster than expected.


 * COMMENTS**


 * Comment by Esra CATE**

First of all, I liked all the techniques that you shared with us. Especially, "student as teacher" can be applied in multi-cultural classes both in EFL and ESL contexts. Making students talk about the topic they are familiar with, or like would help them to increase their comfort level during speaking tasks. Interviewing native speakers is also very brilliant, effective idea to help students get accustomed to native accents, varities of speech of the target language. It would increase their ability to perceive and produce the target language by being exposed to formal or informal talk from native speakers. Moreover, I found the "pantomime" idea very interesting and enlightening. We are already familiar with using mimics and gestures or using the TPR method to make the learning more effective and fun for the students so that it would be permanent. However, it is not always easy to adjust every topic to use those techniques. Sometimes it is very hard to explain or demonstrate some abstract topics, structures, or words using mimics, gestures or act outs; but we can still try to make it work with the concrete ones and I think it will be very suitable for especially young learners. The last technique which is pictures is similar to the previous one, because this also appeals mostly to visual learners.