24 Part I: Getting Started in TEFL
Picking up language this way is almost effortless. However, busy people want-
ing to learn a new language can’t go back to the restful days of babyhood, or
take a couple of weeks to pick up a simple greeting. So, when students attend
language classes, they need a system or methodology so that they can mea-
sure their progress and balance this against the money they pay. The next
sections give the basics on teaching methods.
In the classroom, students learn actively through direct instruction from
the teacher and pick up the language incidentally at the same time. It’s surpris-
ing how many of your favourite phrases your students imitate just because
you drop them into your lessons. A couple of mine are ‘Okie dokie’ and ‘Here
we go’.
Teaching the easier words fi rst
When you pick up a language by hearing it spoken, everything is thrown at
you at the same time and you have to wade through a lot of ‘noise’ before you
hear something you recognise. However, when you teach systematically you
generally start with easy words and phrases and then add a bit more each
time. You save the most difficult words for the end.
In TEFL you grade whatever you say so that your speech matches the stu-
dents’ level of English. When you start a beginners’ course, for example, you
use a lot of pictures, gestures and repetition to put across the meaning of
basic words like ‘car’ and ‘bus’.
Figure 2-1 uses an imaginary language – we can call it Dummese – to illustrate
a dialogue typical of a Dummese beginner-level lesson.
The teacher in Figure 2-1 uses only four words to teach ‘car’ and ‘bus’ –
‘deeba’ and ‘dooba’ respectively. How about ‘Dum dim’? They must be equiv-
alent to ‘this is a.. .’ in English. With only four words to decipher, the visual
aid of the pictures, along with the reassuring smiles of the teacher, it’s quite
easy for students to crack the code.
The lesson would logically continue with another few words connected with
vehicles and transport as you use easy words in a clear context and build up
from there. If you had to pick out words like these by listening to a compli-
cated traffic report in Dummese, you would have a much more difficult, if not
impossible, task.
