TIPS TO SUCCEED IN YOUR ENGLISH LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

BY: RIDA AFRILYASANTI

Engaging students' attention

This might be your first teaching day. Getting nervous is something common. What you need to do is how to deal with that feeling. What you need is to focus on engaging your students. Here are some tips to help you get your students’ attention and succeed in your English language classroom:

1. Have games in your teaching. As we know, many teachers employ games to help their students learn English. Games are very helpful in language teaching because they can help to motivate students and make repetition less tiresome and boring. You can browse from the Internet for some fun games that can be employed in your language class depending on the materials and your students’ level of ability. You have to be creative to create a repertoire of games that focus on different skills, so when your students begin to lose interest in one game, you can switch to another and keep the learning process fresh. Make sure that your games really suitable with your students’ ability level; avoid very complicated games.
2. Have fun with songs. Everyone likes to sing and enjoy music. Thus, why don’t you bring some songs and employ them in your classroom teaching as your teaching variety. In having song, you first have to analyze the dictions within it. Bring songs that are on your students’ interest, don’t bring your favorite song because your students may won’t recognize it.
3. Bring drama into the classroom. Adding some drama to your lesson plans can effectively hold your students’ interest. Instead of having monotonous activities by reading dialogue from a text book, you can assign your students to have roles and act out the words to their favorite English movie, dramas, music shows, or others. If you are creative enough, you can create a simplified script that includes famous movie quotes and let your students have fun. Your students will even enjoy more if you can record your students’ performance. This will not only give you more opportunities to review on your students’ ability in English, but also offer the prospect of very engaging, entertaining in-class activities.
4. Ask for your students’ feedback to improve your teaching. Feedback from your students is very important to know the most suitable activity that you can employ for them. As your students which activities they enjoyed the most at the end of the class, then adapt your lesson plans based on their feedback. By having this, you can understand better the teaching methods that are most effective for your students. Adapting your lessons to your students’ language level and learning style is the best way to meet their language need.

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