A lot of new English language teachers worry: How will I teach beginners when I don’t know their language?
It’s an important question.
In fact, it’s not so common now to have a class of complete beginners. Students learn English in most school systems around the world. Teenagers and young adults have often studied English for years.
But yes, you might encounter complete – or near – beginners, especially very young children and older adults. So, what can you do?
1. Show, don’t tell.
Beginners will only understand something if they see it.
For example, if you’re teaching ‘noodles’ or ‘ship’ – show a real packet of noodles, or a picture of a ship.
It’d be crazy to try to explain ‘noodles are the long things you eat made from wheat or rice flour’!
So, do bring visuals (any types of pictures) and realia (real objects) into every class. And any time you need to, draw on your artistic and performance skills. You can point to a window to teach ‘window’, draw an elephant to teach ‘elephant’, and mime jogging to teach ‘jog’.
The same principle applies to instructions. When you say, ‘Sit down’, make a downwards gesture with your hands. When you say ‘You have three minutes’, hold up three fingers. When you say, ‘You need a pen’, mime holding a pen.
2. Stop talking!
This is related to our first tip. Visuals are great. A lot of teacher talk is a disaster.
The most common reason students get confused is that the teacher says way too much. Teachers are kind-hearted people, and we don’t want to sound mean. As a result, we tend to say things like ‘Now we’re just going to do a fun activity, so if I could just get you all to get out of your seats, OK?’.
Sadly, our beginner students have no idea what we want them to do.
Instead, keep your language really short and simple. ‘Stand up, please’ is clear, yet perfectly polite.
And as we suggested, back up what you say visually. When you say, ‘Stand up’, make an upwards gesture with your hands.
Think briefly before you say anything important, to make sure it comes out simply. That doesn’t mean speaking really loudly and slowly, using weird ‘foreigner talk’ – ‘OPEN BOOK NOW, OK?’. Keep your language natural, but choose words you know students will understand, and don’t speak too fast.
3. Set your lesson in a specific place.
Don’t start a lesson by describing the language students are going to learn: ‘Today we’re learning ‘animals’. Rather, locate your lesson in a specific place. For example, show a picture of a zoo, and ask, ‘Where are we today? …Yes, the zoo!’.
Why?
Let’s start with children. Children can’t deal with abstraction, and it’s boring to them. Beginning a lesson by introducing a ‘category’ of words – animals, or colours, types of weather – might make sense to adults, but not necessarily young students.
Instead, use visuals to have students imagine they’re not in the classroom, but in a different place. It can be somewhere from the children’s everyday world, like a zoo, their kitchen at home, the art room at school, a park, a toy shop. Or somewhere from their fantasy world, like a castle or an alien planet.
Then teach the words as students encounter them in this new place: ‘What’s that? It’s an elephant!’.
How about adults?
Of course, in their first language, adults can deal with an abstract idea like ‘greetings’ or ‘requests’. But how do you convey this when students don’t know the English word ‘greeting’ or ‘request’? In this case, introducing a lesson with ‘Today we’re learning greetings’ is meaningless.
Instead, start with a situation relevant to students’ lives – at a party, in the office, on public transport, at an airport, in a bar. Then introduce the language used in this situation, and the meaning is clear.
4. Expose students to real English.
What’s really motivating for beginner-level students is understanding authentic English from real life. They feel they’ve graduated from baby English to ‘Wow, I can take part in the English-speaking world!’.
When you can, put the textbook aside, and show students ‘authentic materials’ – reading and listening texts not designed and simplified for language learning. Authentic reading materials might be real magazines, maps, brochures, menus or signs. Authentic listening materials could be train announcements, recorded messages, short vox-pop interviews or songs.
You might think: How can beginners understand this material? The secret is to simplify the task, not the text. Get students to do something simple but useful when they read or listen. They could find the correct bus route from school to the city on a map or find something they want to eat on a menu, or locate today’s temperature in a weather forecast, or understand when the next train is coming from a subway announcement.
The aim is not to understand every word. It’s to help students find and understand the information they need.
5. Give students useful things to do outside class.
There are three important things language learners need to improve.
One is noticing form – grammar and spelling, for example. We often deal with that in class.
The other two are exposure (reading and listening to a lot of English), and meaningful communication. The more of these students have, the better. Students have limited time in class, so it’s a huge help if we can suggest how students can read, listen, and interact outside class.
Here are two ideas.
First, suggest to students they should read and listen to a wide range of things for fun. It’s not ‘homework’. It should be something students choose themselves. We want them to be dying to rush home every day and read or listen to this thing! So, find out your students’ interests, and give examples of things they might want to read or listen to – whether it’s a recipe website, or fashion magazines, or a sport channel on YouTube, or cartoons, or English-language games, or anything!
Second, set your students tasks to do together outside class. Maybe students prepare a two-minute presentation together. Or they create a poster and bring it to the next lesson. Or they practice a dialogue you taught, which they then perform in class. Or they script and perform a video which they show the other students.
6. Think about how students feel.
How students feel is maybe the most important thing of all for their success. Do they feel interested? Bored? Good about themselves? Embarrassed?
A positive emotional experience might inspire someone who is starting to learn English for the rest of their lives. But a negative experience might make them give up on learning altogether.
Beginner students need lots of encouragement, and praise for genuine achievement. (But not constant praise, or it becomes meaningless!) They also need to feel free to try, and make mistakes, without feeling stupid.
Adult beginners, in particular, worry their English level might make them look unintelligent. This anxiety is totally understandable: they might be the CEO of a company, or have a PhD in physics, yet they can only express simple ideas in English. Keep this sensitivity in mind. Help adult students talk about adult topics and communicate their achievements.
So, you can see it’s not only possible to teach complete beginners. With these six simple ideas you’ll help students make rapid progress, and you’ll become an expert teacher of Beginner-level English!
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