How to Teach English to Absolute Beginners

While teaching English to absolute beginners is easier when you share another language with your students, you can do it in English alone. Here's how you can teach ESL beginners without stress or frustration using only English.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Course book for absolute beginners
• Pictures representing common words

1. Get an ESL course book that clearly outlines a plan and goals for absolute beginners. A solid foundation in the basics is vital for your language students' further learning. Unfortunately though, when teaching beginners, it's all too easy skip over grammar and vocabulary you think they know. A good course book will keep you on track.

2. Start with what they know. Especially in urban areas, very few people know no English. From TV, pop music or even advertising, many people have picked up phrases like "Thank you" and "I love you." Find out what your students know and build on those words and phrases.

3. Get them talking with the Direct Approach. The Direct Approach is a dialogue-based language teaching method for absolute beginners. The teacher might walk up to a student and say "Hi. I'm Jamie. You are...?" using gestures for "I" and "you" until the student can reply correctly. You can teach a whole English course for absolute beginners this way, but there's room to mix in other ESL teaching methods too.

4. Try Total Physical Response. This teaching methods involves students physically acting on the teacher's instructions. With this method you can move from the "He is Juan. This is a book." phrases of the Direct Approach to more involved English sentences like "Juan, please put this book on the smaller table."

5. Use pictures. Pictures teach vocabulary fast. To avoid confusion, use pictures that show only on thing. Otherwise, make sure you clearly point out the object in the picture that you're naming. It's easy to teach English nouns and adjectives this way, but with verbs and adverbs, you'll still need to do a little acting to make sure you've clearly conveyed the word's meaning.

6. Make good use of gestures and facial expressions in your ESL class. With facial expressions and body language, you can also teach words for feelings and opinions, such as "tired" and "love." You can also develop a set of gestures for certain common requests, such as pointing to your ear for "repeat." It may take a one or two lessons for all your ESL students to understand these signals, but overall it will speed up communication.

Tips & Warnings

• The Direct Approach, Total Physical Response and the Silent Way are just a few of the methods for teaching absolute beginners when you don't speak their language. Become familiar with these and other methods, so you can better meet beginners' needs.
• Because English spelling isn't phonetic, remember to write new words and sentences on the board once your students have learned to pronounce them.
• Don't rush. When you provide students in an immersion ESL class with a good foundation in the basics, their abilities will improve exponentially. It will take some time before absolute beginners can really communicate, but once they get started you may wonder how they learned so much.
• If you use gestures to give instructions, make sure your gestures aren't considered rude in the culture your teaching in.

Resources

• Get tips on how to work with beginners on the first day of class.
• Read an overview of how to use Total Physical Response.
• iteslj.org has articles on how absolute beginners learn.
• ESLCafe.com's Cookbook section offers activity ideas for beginners.
• Download free flashcards for beginners at ESLFlashcards.com.

[Dianamoz]

on 11/11/2008 Excellent thank you.