Tip #1: Talk a lot
Contrary to some opinions you might have heard, lots of teacher talk in English is actually a good thing. It’s an excellent source of English language comprehensible input.
It’s likely to be better than recorded or filmed input, because it’s directly addressed to your students, you can design and adapt it to suit their levels and needs, and it’s ‘live’, taking place in real time.
Your spoken input is particularly important if your students hear little or no English outside your classroom – which is true for most teaching situations in the world today. In such cases, you are the only source of good spoken English your students will have.
Teacher talk can take the form of explicit language teaching: explanations of grammar or vocabulary, for example. Or it can be instructions on how to do an activity or what the homework is.
So don’t feel guilty that you’re talking too much, or that your classroom is too teacher-centred!
Tip #2: Use mother tongue occasionally
In most English teaching situations, students share a mother tongue (L1) which is known also to the teacher.
- If we insist on speaking exclusively in English when students are not understanding, we are conveying the messages that English is incomprehensible, or that it’s OK not to understand – messages which surely we don’t want our students to get. And a lot of students get frustrated and demoralised by their lack of comprehension: it makes them feel stupid.
A more positive argument is that the fact that students already know one language can be used to help learning. Occasional use of the L1 in our own speech can add clarity, provide useful insights into how the language works, and save time which can then be used for further engagement with English. So use L1 in, for example, the following situations:
- If there’s an explanation of grammar or vocabulary which would be too difficult for the students in English, explain quickly in the L1 and then use the time saved to provide, or elicit from students, examples of the target items in use.
- If students are commonly making a mistake based on L1 interference, show them what the difference is between the two languages that produces the mistake: it will help them avoid it.
- If students can understand most of the content of what you are talking about – for example, when you’re telling a story – allow yourself to translate an unknown word here and there, to help students follow.
Tip #3: Don’t give homework at the end
- If you know you have a homework assignment to give, explain it sometime in the middle of the lesson and make sure students have noted it down. Don’t leave it until the last minute.
- In general, give the homework immediately after the lesson component that it relates to: for example, comprehension work on a text you’ve been reading. Then you aren’t rushed, can explain fully and answer questions about it, and students have time to write it down. If you note it at the side of the board as you explain, then you can use this note as the basis for a brief reminder before closing the lesson later.
Tip #4: Prepare homework-giving in advance
- It’s not enough just to note down in advance what homework you are going to assign; you need to think about how you’re going to give it, and at what point in the lesson.
You need to plan, and allow several minutes of lesson time, for the following:
- Giving clear instructions. It may be necessary, in beginner classes, to give these in the students’ mother tongue, if you know it, in order to be quite certain that they understand. Another useful strategy is to perform a sample of the ‘kind of thing’ you are asking them to do with volunteer students, in order to clarify. For example, do one or two of the items of the exercise, or write a elicit a sentence or two of a written assignment.
- Writing up the homework on the board as well as just giving oral instructions. Doing this makes the assignment clearer, and also enables you to come back at the end of the lesson and remind students about it, pointing to the note on the board.
- Giving students the opportunity to ask questions, in order to clarify anything that isn’t clear to them.
- Telling them why you are giving it. It’s important for students to be aware what the learning purpose is: that it’s not just given arbitrarily for the sake of giving homework!
- Getting students to write down the assignment in their notebooks, including the date when it is due.
- Optionally, giving them time to start doing it in class.
For more tips, please watch:
Penny Ur’s new book 100 Teaching Tips, the latest in our Cambridge Handbook for Language Teachers series. We’re sharing with you four tips of the book’s 100 hands-on tips across 19 different areas of classroom teaching, based on Penny’s comprehensive teaching experience in ELT over the past 40 years.
Who is Penny Ur?
Penny was educated at the universities of Oxford (MA), Cambridge (PGCE) and Reading (MA). She emigrated to Israel in 1967, where she still lives today. Penny has thirty years’ experience as an English teacher in elementary, middle and high schools in Israel. Now retired, she has taught M.A. courses at Oranim Academic College of Education and Haifa University.
Penny has presented papers at TESOL, IATEFL and various other English teachers’ conferences worldwide. She has published a number of articles, and was for ten years the editor of the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series.
Her books include Discussions that Work (1981), Five Minute Activities (co authored with Andrew Wright) (1992), A Course in Language Teaching (1996), and Grammar Practice Activities (2nd Edition) (2009), all published by Cambridge University Press.
Sources:
http://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/cambridgeenglish/authors/penny-ur
Cambridge English Languages 
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