The Dos and Donts of Language Teaching (Part 1) - Vocabulary

I am an English Language Teacher, I studied at a private university but I was on a full ride so I paid approximately none for the school, I never grow tired of bragging about it. I also attended CELTA course last July to keep it fresh. If you don't know about it, it is a course Cambridge University offers, the intensive course takes 4 months to complete and in the end, you have revised the whole of university curriculum and add some depth to it. Now I have a more clear idea of how to teach. I live in Turkey and Turkish students are by all means stubborn as a mule (In Turkish, we say "goat") they feel they are bound to traditional methods and just because they pay, they own you and they can order you to teach in the way they desire (or let's adopt a more humanistic approach and say they like to be taught in the way they feel most comfortable with). It was proven once and for all that their method sucks and they can't master the English language.

Turkey is known to be sickly educated to speak English. I mean, we can't. We can't speak the language. I believe it is about the mindset we have, the attitude we adopt and the extent to which we allow flexibility in our lives, or in a narrower environment, the classroom.

I know during the CELTA course which I took in Turkey the students were nearly open to everything because they promised that and they didn't pay anything they were there to help us, weird. Even though us, candidates failed to offer them good lessons, the majority of them was patient with us and picked up one or two things at the least.

In the language school I work for, the students report me almost after every lesson during the first few weeks because I'm different and they do not want someone to have such power on them. I'm telling you, us, Turks are really hard to get on with.

From now on, I will share with you the basics, tips and some key activities you can use as a language teacher.

Here comes the first one;
Unlike Turkish, English words is not pronounced as it is written and it creates huge problems in production phases. Human brain works in an odd way. That is, if you encounter a word on a piece of paper, your mind strives to find the correct way to say it and usually fails. So, what the teacher must do is provide the students with the correct pronounciation first, make sure they are comfortable with it by drilling it and only THEN show the spelling. Knowing that, the language students of this age usually keen on learning the language in order to communicate with people (or even migrate, if you are in a shitty country as mine), speaking and thus, producing correct sounds is of great importance. (I'm not saying spelling is of minor importance, folks).

Here is one way I always use in my classes regardless of the proficiency level of the students;
Using of pictures. This always work for concrete (Cambridge dictionary defines it as; clear and certain, or real and existing in a form that can be seen or felt) terms.

What is this?

Yes, it's "an apple"! (You don't need to explain everything while you present something, or you might lose the hold of it and end up in a place that you have failed to foresee before, so here, you don't need to tell the students why they have to use "an" with "apple".)

(Here is what I mean by "you might lose the hold of it"; "Yes, that's an apple, Do you know where apple grows? Oh, a tree! By the way, the person who cuts trees is called a lumberjack and the tool they use is an axe. --- But the next picture is...

Yeah, an orange... But your students are still thinking about a lumberjack holding an axe...

In summary;
1- Pronounciation before the spelling...
2- Stay on the topic...
3- Use pictures where you can (for concrete terms)...
4- Drill the word, your pronunciation is already awesome make sure the what students produce is just as good...
5- Absurdity is actually a key player in teaching... I'm going to cover it later on.

Stay with love and please comment below the ideas or any possible concerns you have, try to be constructive, though :) Peace out.