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There are many different methods to teaching English. Over the years it has developed from a high teacher talk time, to more engaging, student-high activities and lesson structure, such as Presentation, Practice, and Performance, Communicative Language Teaching, and Task-Based Learning. By using these more student-centric methods, I believe it motivates students more and leads to higher retention because it encompasses different learning styles and relies on the student to create the content themselves, thus quickening the learning-to-application process. When putting together a plan, a lesson should always involve Engage, Study, and Activate stages (starting with Engage and ending with Activate, but repeating and mixing the order of the three stages within these bookends as many or as little times as would like). Engage is about review and fun, to warm the students up to English and excite them about what they already know. Study is about introducing new content and focuses on the construction of the language, using elicitation as much as possible to combine what they know with what they've just learned - this invites higher student talk-time. Activate stage encourages students to use all the English they know including the day's lesson, with an emphasis on fluency over accuracy. Games, role play, discussions, drills, whiteboard work, and worksheets are tools used in each or some of these areas. On that point, there is a difference between mistakes and errors - mistakes are a slip of the tongue or something they know is wrong, and can easily fix. An error occurs when the student genuinely thinks they are right, or don't know and take a guess, or when they know it's not right but don't know what else to do. Teachers need to stay positive when correcting mistakes or errors. During the engage and activate stage, correction should be kept to a minimum, and generally, mistakes and errors should only be corrected if it relates to the lesson, if it is a regular error in danger of being ingrained in their thinking, or once the learner has finished their flow.
