During my second teaching practicum, I had a hard time giving instructions to my students and eliciting information from them. Being a novice teacher, I had to improve myself to ensure optimal performance in the classroom in the future. The management of the teaching and learning process course opened my eyes to various techniques that I can use in the classroom to give instructions and elicit information from students. it also encouraged me to look for other techniques to vary my arsenal.

Instructions are vital in learning. Failing in giving clear and correct instructions like making them complicated or giving them while not having students ‘attention first will result in confusion as is confirmed by Jimalee Sowell´s paper that I read during the online course. But, there are some other tips related to the teacher´s behavior that can help while instructing. such as, eye contact which was a major hindrance to my performance during the second teaching practicum. While I was teaching, I tried to avoid looking at the students´ eyes and just kept writing on the board and explaining at the same time which is a bad practice because students will not have any idea about what I said. (Bolen, n.d.) Suggests that teachers should write what they want to explain on the board and then turn around and talk to students this way they have a high chance of understanding what is being said.

 While giving instructions, teachers should keep in mind to slow down so as to allow students to catch up on what is being said to them. During my second teaching practicum, my mentor noticed that I was speaking too fast. And at the same time, using complicated terms made matters worse considering I was teaching common core students who barely know English. In her article, (Bolen, n.d.) Says that beginner learners struggle to understand simple things which require the teachers to keep their speech speed in check. Otherwise, the students will not be able to decipher what is being said to them.

Using ICQs is important after giving instructions to check whether the students understood what they have to do or not. During the first session of my second teaching practicum, I did not ask good ICQs and I just kept asking the students “Do you understand?”. This does not help because some students will answer “Yes” even though they do not understand. According to (Gates, 2013) ICQs should be simple and teachers should use a combination of right or wrong questions. For example, do I want you to work in groups of 3? In small groups? In pairs?. Or, simply having students repeat the instructions back to the teacher.

Elicitation is a vital skill that teachers need to master. Otherwise, they will just fall into the trap of explaining every detail of the lesson to their students without having the students put forward ideas to enrich the lesson. This is exactly what my mentor noticed during my teaching practicum performance. I did not let the students come up with their own ideas to enrich the lesson because I thought I needed to make the lesson easy by explaining everything to them so that they can understand which increased my TTT.

 (Verner, 2019) Offered many techniques that allow teachers to elicit. If the goal of the teacher is to elicit vocabulary elements, they can give students definitions of target words and ask them to come up with the matching word or give them synonyms from which they need to derive a word. Another natural way of eliciting vocabulary is for the teacher to pretend to forget a word while speaking. This will urge the students to supply the missing word.

Eliciting can also be applied for grammar by using pictures that depict the grammar structure that the teacher wants to show and have the students describe them (Verner, 2019). I applied this during a grammar lesson about the present continuous tense. Though, the only difference was that the pictures I used were animated ones which made the idea of the action being performed in the present more obvious to the students.

Having had the course combined with the feedback of my mentor certainly helped me acquire a great deal of knowledge on elicitation and instruction. And, encouraged me to look more into the two skills which made me reflect on my performance during the teaching practicum. Certainly, the way I teach inside the classroom will change for the better after knowing these two skills in detail.

References:

Bolen, J. (n.d.). Giving Instructions: Tips for Teachers | Teaching ESL Abroad. Retrieved from ESL Activity: https://www.eslactivity.org/an-esl-reading-lesson-plan-template/

Gates, D. (2013, May 24). What are Instruction Check Questions? Retrieved from Online TEFL Training: https://www.onlinetefltraining.com/what-are-instruction-check-questions/

Verner, S. (2019, August 23). 15 Easy Techniques to Elicit English from Your ESL Students. Retrieved from Busy Teacher: https://busyteacher.org/23819-15-eliciting-techniques-for-esl.html

BRAHIM SAAD (G4)