5 quick tips for teaching English to big classes | Teaching ESL with Jackie

Do you have a big class filled with lots of students who want to learn English? It can be a bit terrifying, right? That’s where these tips for big classes come in. These five tips are designed for large English classes and will get everyone organized. Keep on watching for some of the best tips for ESL or EFL teaching. ------- • Check out this blog post for activities for teaching big classes hhttps://www.eslactivity.org/top-10-esl-activities-big-classes/ • Want another video on teaching adults? Watch @NormasTeaching video "Teaching Adults English: Your First Lesson" here: https://youtu.be/h6BbL81jA8Y • Want a video on lesson plan tips? Watch that here: https://youtu.be/NmG214ENH2g ------ Check out my book ESL/EFL Teaching Practice and Methodology here: https://amzn.to/3CFNEWs https://www.facebook.com/eslspeaking https://www.pinterest.ca/eslspeaking/ https://www.instagram.com/jackie.bolen/ https://www.tiktok.com/@englishwithjackie?lang=en #teachingenglishwithjackie #teachingenglish #teachingtips -------------------------------------------------------- Transcript: Hi this is Jackie from eslspeaking.org. Here are my top five tips for teaching ESL or EFL to Big classes. By big classes, I mean probably more than around 20 students. I used to teach in Korean universities and I would often have classes of 30 or 40 students I know this is often the case in China and Taiwan maybe Japan as well. It can be a little bit tough to manage if you're the only teacher in that situation, however, it is possible by designing your class well. Here are my tips. The first tip I have is to treat students in kind of groups put them into groups of three or four and treat them as kind of a unit so I mean if I have a class of like say five or six people, everyone is an individual. I would call them by name, I would interact individually with them, however in a class that big if you start calling individually on 40 people it's way too teacher centered, and not enough student talking time and all that. The next tip is to do some task-based learning projects. I'll put a link up there for you for some ideas and yeah this is just a really nice way for students to get additional practice in their groups or small teams and the teacher can kind of act more of as a guide rather than an all-knowing Guru. It's very student-centered and it's a nice way because each group of say like four students can do a little quick presentation at the end of their task and you're only listening to say like 10 presentations or eight presentations instead of like 30 or 40 presentations. The next thing is homework so if you're teaching that many students I would just really caution you to think very carefully about what kind of homework you assign. Think about do you really want to be grading 40 cases of like whatever you assign so I will generally do kind of things that are easy you're on the grading or things that are just kind of like pass fail so for example I get students to make a video a self-introduction video and it would either be you did it or you didn't do it but if you grade thing, if you assign homework where you're like going through the Nitty Gritty details trying to assign half points for this and grammar and vocabulary and just all this kind of stuff, it can actually be really tedious and tiring. Whenever possible I like to put students have them working in pairs in small groups, maybe one group talks to another group about something kind of surveys that kind of thing. I try not to stand at the front of the class and lecture or talk too much and this also involves like talking one-to-one like "oh hey Bob what do you think?" "oh hey Jenny what's your answer?" "hey how about you Keith what's your answer?" so that is very student-centered. That leads me to the next one I like to do. I think of students kind of doing individual work then they join together with a partner and they maybe compare answers or they chat about something then I have those two pairs joined together with another pair so that they can form a little group and then maybe at that point we will come together as a class and then I will elicit an answer from a group, one answer from this group, one answer from this group, so kind of just think about student talking time and try to increase this as much as possible. Timestamp: 0:00 Intro 0:32 1. Put students into groups 1:03 2. Do task-based learning projects 1:47 3. Homework 2:26 4. Have student-centred activities 2:54 5. Have students be in smaller groups 4:05 Outro Tags: esl teaching tips, teaching tips for esl, efl teaching tips, 20 students, eslgroup, esl group work, tefl class ideas, big classes, big classrooms, esl group activities, large class, big class, esl groups, fun english class, big groups, classroom management, how to manage a class, big classroom tips, how to teach big, how to teach a class, english esl class, e