Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Dongba Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Nanjing Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
Teacher speaking time or Teacher talking time (TTT) is the amount of time the teacher talks in the classroom, this can be compared with student talking time (STT) which is the amount of time student talk in the classroom. It has been determined that TTT must be reduced and student talking time must be maximized. There are a number of reasons why reducing TTT such as: excessive TTT limits the amount of STT; a large amount of TTT leads to loss of concentration, boredom and reduced learning; teacher long explanations are tedious and hard to follow; TTT reduces students opportunities for developing the speaking skill; TTT makes students not to take responsibility for their own learning. The goal is for the teacher to take up no more than 50% of the class time with talking. The more the students talk, the more likely they are to improve. When students are able to freely express their opinions in a class, they’re more satisfied with the outcome. Even if they don’t learn as much about grammar or vocabulary, they’ll be advancing their practical speaking skills. There are some strategies to help teachers reduce their talking time: Elicit: Elicitation is a technique by which the teacher gets the learners to give information rather than giving it to them. If students are presented with clear examples and guiding questions, they often do not need to be “told”. This kind of guided discovery leads to better understanding and more successful learning. Organizing activities as pair work also means that students have chance to talk to each other and the interaction in the classroom doesn’t have to be between learner and teacher. Instructions: giving instructions is an integral part of being a teacher. The use of body language, mime, gestures and the facial expressions is more effective rather than words. The position of the teacher in the classroom can also indicate to the students what is expected of them at a particular stage of the lesson. The teacher is going to be spending a lot of time telling students what to do and when to do it. Keep instructions simple and clear. Getting students to give feedbacks on tasks to each other rather than to the teacher. This is often done in pairs, but answers can also be checked against a key. Student nomination, whereby one student nominates another to answer a question, is also a useful technique. Feedback involving the teacher is therefore limited to problematic questions rather than every question in an exercise. Eliminating unnecessary TTT. Grading language is important, but over-simplification can lead to unnatural models from the teacher. Instructions should be kept simple, while explanations need to be carefully worded and repeated if necessary rather than paraphrased. Simple concept questions should be asked to check understanding. If explanations are clear and concept checking is effective, there should be no need for re-explanation or interrupting an activity to reteach or reinstruct. Tolerating silence. Inexperienced teachers particularly tend to fill silences by unnecessary talking. Silence is important not only when students are working individually, but also provides “processing time” between instructions, during explanation, while waiting for a student to respond, and during monitoring of activities. Prompting, providing clues and rephrasing the question are often counterproductive when the student merely needs time to answer.
