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When a reader wrote in to ask, “I wonder what you have to offer in the way of advice for becoming certified to teach before I leave for some other country from the USA?” I couldn’t help but take the time to respond a bit to a person poised on the brink of such a potentially life-altering event as this. The reader further added, “Do you think that an online TEFL course would suffice, or would it be better to do a CELTA course?” What a loaded question that is. Can’t you just picture the trouble I could get into answering that one? Here’s some of what my response contained plus a few additions.

CELTA or TEFL?
While a good TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course from a reputable school or institute can be a tremendous boost in preparing you for the rigors and challenges of ELT (English language teaching) abroad, my preference is towards the CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults). The quality of TEFL certificate courses can vary considerably and great care should be taken in selecting a TEFL certificate course. Personally, I recommend an official CELTA course first while in the USA, Canada or the UK for a more than a couple of good reasons.

First - CELTA training will provide you with well-founded teaching tools and skills that will stand you in good stead once you begin teaching. The CELTA course is rigorously monitored so quality is highly constant across a variety of different schools, institutions and organizations that offer it.

Second - The CELTA is recognized world wide as a solid EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teaching credential, meaning that your English level is high and that you have proven knowledge of English language teaching techniques. It also indicates that you have in fact practice taught at satisfactory levels and that you understand learner needs and how to approach them, among other essential ELT basic skills.

Third - Almost all officially recognized CELTA programs have job placement services for their graduates, which means you can land your first job before you leave the USA. You’ll have local contacts provided for you and the reputation of the school behind you as well. You may even be able to get leads on a second or even third position from your CELTA course provider as time ticks on if you need a change. This offers an excellent introduction to teaching while helping to minimize elements of the “culture shock” often experienced during your first overseas job.

Fourth - A CELTA course is designed to prepare you for the realities of teaching EFL abroad to learners who may know little or no English. With the confidence and ability to teach English to foreign learners without a knowledge of their L1 is an important skill that will often place you head and shoulders above many other “local” English teachers who frequently rely heavily on use of the learners’ L1 (first language).

Fifth - Taking the CELTA in the USA, an English-speaking country, will enable you to start preparing your own “care package” of materials before you leave for your new job. It happens that many locations where we find ourselves teaching English simply do not have an extensive array of materials available. At home in the USA however, virtually any materials you’d like to use is not only available in abundance, but is usually dirt cheap as well.

If you need more information you can check out my article series on English language teaching at ezinearticles.com. I sincerely hope this offers you some guidance. Best wishes for a great career in a location that’s interesting for you

and good luck, you’ll need it.

Prof. Larry M. Lynch is an ELT Teacher Trainer, English language learning expert author and university professor in Cali, Colombia. He has published more than 350 articles and academic papers and presented at numerous EFL teacher training and TEFL conferences throughout North America, South America and Europe. For comments, questions, requests, to receive more information or to be added to his free TESOL articles and teaching materials mailing list, e-mail: lynchlarrym@gmail.com

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In my previous article “How to Add Drama to an EFL Class or Start a Drama Group” some interesting ways in which you could initiate Drama into an EFL class or new drama group we suggested. If you’re a foreign language student, sooner or later you’ll start becoming “tired” or “bored” with the more conventionally used teaching approaches. This is especially true if you attend (or teach) a class that must follow a standard curriculum or course book series. To crank out more speaking and develop more vocabulary and language use in context, try some of these additional drama-based activities to spice things up a bit.

Do Improvised Dialogues

Another popular technique is to “improvise” scenes based on specific character sets in different situations like a Mother - Daughter, Father - Son, Teacher - Student, Boss - Worker, Robber - Bank Teller, Waiter - Customer, or a multitude of other possible combinations of two, three or even more characters. Give each character set a scenario in which to work like a son with bad grades who wants to borrow Dad’s car. A Mother who needs help around the house with a daughter giving excuses so she can talk on the phone with her friends.

Have a student answer the phone and have a chat with the “wrong number” who wants to talk anyway.

Interview a famous person

Simulate an interview with a famous person or historic figure or even create a fictitious scene involving a famous person or historic figure. You can get an extensive list of famous people / historic figures the students are familiar with and use these as a basis for constructing scenes and dialogues. You can even have famous people “Talk” to each other who couldn’t literally have done so. What would Jesus or Mohammed say to Adolph Hitler? What would George Washington say to Marilyn Monroe, Pamela Anderson or JFK? What might Chairman Moa and Idi Amin or Augustus Pinochet have talked about? How about a chat between Princess Diana and Cleopatra or Marie Antoinette? The possibilities are endless. Some wonderful ideas, dialogues, scenes and scripts could come out of a little swapping and brainstorming in this manner.

Schizophrenic Dialogues

These fun dialogues will erase any timidness the learners may have in speaking in front of others. Start with your most uninhibited learners at first until others from the group “get up their nerve” to do this activity. In this dramatic speaking practice activity the person “talks” to themselves taking on multiple roles in a dialogue, asking themselves a question and then answering themselves too. The schizophrenic person could also argue pros and cons of a decision or situation aloud. They are often hilarious and loads of fun once the students get the hang of it. A man can discus / argue the pros and cons of going out with woman A or woman B. Betty or Nicole? A woman learner can do the reverse. Tom or Jerry? Other sample themes are; Which friend to tell a secret? Which car to buy? Which vacation to take? The fun almost never ends.

To continue to get even more mileage from these activities and materials, record and use them for listening comprehension, error-correction exercises, pronunciation, language use or grammar practice activities in another class. Teachers and students, I hope some of these ideas help with starting material. I’ll send you some more specific suggestions if you’ll tell me specific areas you’d like more information on. Please let me know about your progress and experiences. Good luck.

Prof Larry M. Lynch is a certified English language teacher / trainer, bi-lingual copywriter, expert author and photographer specializing in business, travel, food and education-related writing in South America. His work has appeared in Transitions Abroad, South American Explorer, Escape From America, Mexico News and Brazil magazines. He teaches at a university in Cali, Colombia. To read more or get additional original, exclusive language education based articles and content for your newsletter, blog or website contact him at: lynchlarrym@gmail.com.

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Based on my 15 years of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teaching experience, the statement “grammar teaching should be implicit, not explicit” could be argued both for and against. Whether to teach grammar as an extracted focus of ELT (English Language Teaching) or more passively as an inductive, integral topic has been the theme of countless debates on the part of institutions, professors, grammarians and language researchers for decades. Grammar is the branch of linguistics dealing with the form and structure of words or morphology, and their interrelation in sentences, called syntax. The study of grammar reveals how language works, an important aspect in both English acquisition and learning.

In the early 20th century grammarians like the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas and the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen began to describe languages and Boas’ work formed the basis of various types of American descriptive grammar study. Jespersen’s work was the fore-runner of such current approaches to linguistic theory such as Noam Chomsky’s Transformational Generative Grammar.

Chomsky, who studied structural linguistics, sought to analyze the syntax of English in a structural grammar. This led him to view grammar as a theory of language structure rather than a description of actual sentences. His idea of grammar is that it is a device for producing the structure, not of a particular language, but of the ability to produce and understand sentences in any and all languages. Since grammar is the means by which we can understand how a language “works”, a definitive study of language grammar is essential to language study.

Strictly explicit grammar study however, and even grammar-focused lessons are often not communicatively based. They can therefore be boring, cumbersome and difficult for students to assimilate. The strict teaching of grammar / structure, except with students of the Logical - Mathematical or Verbal - Linguistic multiple intelligences, can be frustrating and highly ineffective.

Grammar teaching should be implicit

In the early 20th century, Jespersen, like Boas, thought grammar should be studied by examining living speech rather than by analyzing written documents. By providing grammar in context, in an implicit manner, we can expose students to substantial doses of grammar study without alienating them to the learning of English or other foreign language. I also agree with this implicit approach of teaching grammar. The principal manner in which I accomplish this is by teaching short grammar-based sessions immediately followed by additional function-based lessons in which the new grammar / structure is applied in context.

The hypothesis is that adult language students have two distinct ways of developing skills and knowledge in a second language, acquisition and learning. Acquiring a language is “picking it up”, i.e., developing ability in a language by using it in natural, communicative situations. Learning language differs in that it is “knowing the rules” and having a conscious knowledge of grammar / structure. Adults acquire language, although usually not as easily or as well as children. Acquisition, however, is the most important means for gaining linguistic skills. A person’s first language (L1) is primarily learned in this way. This manner of developing language skills typically employs implicit grammar teaching and learning.

Grammar teaching should be explicit

This does not exclude explicit grammar-teaching entirely, however. Some basic features of English language grammar structure are illogical or dissimilar to speakers of other languages and do not readily lend themselves to being well understood, even in context. In cases where features of English grammar are diametrically opposed or in some other way radically different from the manner of expression in the student’s L1, explicit teaching may be required.

Aspects of English language grammar that may offer exceptional challenge to EFL students include use of word order, determiners (this, that, these, those, a, an, the), prepositions (in, on, at, by, for, from, of), auxiliaries (do, be, have), conjunctions (but, so, however, therefore, though, although), interrogatives, intensifiers (some, any, few, more, too) and distinctions between modal verbs (can, could, would, should, may, might, must). Phrasal verbs also present considerable difficulty to Spanish speakers learning communicative English.

Some students also are logical or linguistically-biased thinkers who respond well to structured presentation of new material. Logical-Mathematical and Verbal-Linguistic intelligence learners are prime examples of those that would respond well to explicit grammar teaching in many cases.

Based on my English language teaching and on my second and third foreign language learning (L2, L3) experience, an exclusive approach using either implicit or explicit methodologies is not as effective as utilizing one or the other of these approaches as required. Although it is essential to teach elements of language and develop communicative abilities in our students, there is no one best way to introduce and provide practice in them. Young learners have more natural facility in acquisition, while adults may benefit substantially from more “formal” language learning. Learning styles and intelligence strengths are also a significant factor.

There are many generally accepted ways of introducing the sounds, structure and vocabulary of English, including colloquial forms of conversation and the four basic communication skills. Grammar provides for “communicative economy”. Grammar teaching should be implicit, or explicit, as teaching / learning conditions may dictate helping to minimize the student response teachers fear most, “Teacher, I don’t understand.”

Note: Academic references for this article are available on request.

Related language learning and teaching articles in this series available online include:

“Learning a Language: 6 Effective Ways to Use the Internet”
http://ezinearticles.com/?id=76453

“Six Quick Tricks for Learning a Language”
http://EzineArticles.com/?id=72718

“What’s the Strangest Thing you’ve Ever Eaten?”
http://EzineArticles.com/?id=81349

“What Makes a Person Intelligent?”
http://EzineArticles.com/?id=81350

Teach English in Colombia: Grappling with Grammar, Gold, Guns, and Guayaba
http://ezinearticles.com/?id=85995

Try This for Perfecting Past Tense Pronunciation Practice
http://ezinearticles.com/?id=86780

7 Steps to Better Business English: Choosing a Business English Training Program
http://ezinearticles.com/?id=81697

English Only in the EFL Classroom: Worth the Hassle?
http://ezinearticles.com/?id=89180

Prof. Larry M. Lynch has taught EFL, published ELT articles as an expert author, presented at numerous TESOL conferences and trained teachers in the USA, Colombia, Mexico, Ecuador, Panama and Spain. His work has appeared in Transitions Abroad, South American Explorer, Escape from America, Mexico News and Brazil magazines. At present he teaches at the Universidad Santiago de Cali in Cali, Colombia. To get original, exclusive articles and content for your newsletter, blog or website or information on TEFL presentations, specialized teacher training programs or conference speaking engagements contact him at: lynchlarrym@gmail.com

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