Learn Englishes

In this article, you need to imagine that you are an English teacher and going to teach at primary level. I will be telling you how to teach English. It is really important to have a lesson plan. Some people make their lesson plan by thinking over night what to teach in morning class. But my recommendations are that they should write a proper plan before entering the class. They should have clear understanding of the learners, their needs, their psychology and learning experiences. You will not be able to apply any teaching method until you have the basic information about your students. You should follow the steps to apply teaching strategies:

Assessing Learner Levels before Teaching

First, I would conduct a language proficiency test that will assist me in knowing the current level of the learners. If there are three levels of learners, I would divide them into three sections. You can assess writing skills.

How to Teach English to a Specific Class Size?

The standard quantity of students would be between 10-12 because activity-based learning may not be applied to a large number of students at the same time. For grade five students, each lesson would be covered in 20 minutes, while the activities would be conducted in 40 minutes. The total duration of the lesson would be 1 hour each day, and I would take classes four days a week. I would focus on parts of speech and tenses only. The preferable activities would be based on question-answer sessions, fill-in-the-blanks, picture reading, and chart completion.

Engaging Activities for Effective Learning

The dress pattern may also be decided earlier. For example, if a teacher is going to talk about different nationalities, he may wear a Pakistani flag shirt.

Quality Over Quantity in Teaching

In English language classrooms, most teachers focus on the quantity of content because they are asked by the administration to complete the syllabus. Particularly in the Pakistani exam system, everyone is running to memorize content and get good grades. Nobody bothers about having the concept of a particular topic. In my opinion, teachers should focus on quality.

Tips for Maintaining Teaching Effectiveness

1. Teach Less, Engage More: I would teach less but engage the learners in activities. For instance, I may take 5 days to teach Present Simple Tense.
2. Class Size Management: The first step should be to have an idea about the number of students in the class. The standard size of a class is always in the mind of a trained teacher, and they try to keep a smaller number of students to ensure good interaction, especially when applying CLT or the Direct Method. For example, if a teacher is teaching 20 students and the class timing is only 40 minutes, it might be hard for each student to speak for more than two minutes.

Here, you can read about how to improve vocabulary and fluency while learning English.