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Studying materials for this Unit, I realised, that I am a quite experienced teacher in terms of delivering lessons to various types of students, yet on individual basis. I have given lessons for beginners, for ? very adult (50 y.o.), for students with special purposes (English for Engineers, Medical English, Academic English) and even for a young (6 y.o.) beginner. As for teaching groups, I have very little experience in this area. Theoretically, I find multilingual groups more challenging and monolingual groups easier to teach, as once one student understands, he/she will immediately spill the beans to others in L1, that?s for sure, I?ve been there. There are some specific ins and outs in each case, but some rules are universal: praise and encourage as much as possible (thumbs up, silent applause, mime and gesture), be consistent, drill, repeat, drill, repeat, drill etc. It?s very important to avoid pushing beginners into speaking before they?ve had enough opportunity to listen to teacher using new words and constructions. Still, with one of my adult and highly motivated absolute beginner I did quite a trick by having given him a list of three hundred most common English words and their meanings (words were written both in Roman and Cyrillic letters) at the very first lesson. As soon as he learned them all (within a couple of weeks) he became remarkably more confident and spoke willingly. For diversity, when practising new sentence, back-drilling activity may be helpful and fun (for that we need to break down the sentence into manageable units and then build it back up from the end to the beginning). I would say, teachers preferably have not only to have plan B, yet C and D. I mean, different kinds of games, fillers, visuals should be always prepared. Actually, introducing new language, checking understanding, practising, and potential difficulties, everything for the lesson has to be thought through carefully. Alas, mistakes and failures are unavoidable. Analyze them! Role plays, personal engagement, different visuals (video, images, short movies, ads) help keep students speaking. Actually, with number of activities and approaches being applied, confidence of teacher grows dramatically.
