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People have been studying languages for thousands of years. Luckily not everyone has to study languages Everyone learns their first language without any studying at all. Everyone's first language (L1) is acquired automatically within the early years of childhood. Those who must learn a foreign language have a great challenge facing them. As a future EFL teacher, it is my job to employ the best methods to assist my students. The four methods that I think will be most effective for me are as follows: Presentation Practice and Production -- Present a concept and then practice it using an assignment and then practice using the new component along with previous knowledge. Task or Activity-based Learning -- Give the students a task or activity to complete and observe the students as they explore their new language skills. Community Language Learning -- I will take a break from my role as a teacher and sit in a circle with the students and engage them all in an interesting conversation. Communicative Language Teaching -- I would assist the students with creating and imagining real life scenarios. We would role play these scenarious. Throughout all of these methods, I will need to learn the art of elicitation. I will need to encourage and help the students remember and form their thoughts without letting them borrow my words or my thoughts. When I do have to insert my own words I should always be positive and encouraging. It is more important to make the people feel positive than it is to correct them. The best method of correction is self-correction. this can be accomplished by simply making a face of misunderstanding, or my writing the sentence on the board and asking the student what is wrong with the sentence. Also, other students will help their fellow classmates out. I should only correct students directly as a last result, and only when it is appropriate like during a study session, or if I think the student is forming a bad habit. One very general model for teaching that was introduced in this unit is the ESA model. ESA stands for engage study and Activate. First, you must engage the students, usually with some kind of game or activity that draws everyone's attention in. After the engagement exercise, I will transfer the focus and excitement generated from the first stage directly into the study stage. This is where focus and energy are needed the most. After the intense study stage, I'll move on to the final stage where we implement what we just learned in the activate stage. There are many interesting games and methods suggested in this unit for engaging students and activating/implementing recently learned language. I found the suggestion for eliciting students knowledge particularly useful, and I am glad I have this as a reference to build my future language models.
