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Being a teacher in a foreign land and who does not have a TESOL certificate is quite cumbersome. There are things that I did as a self-proclaimed teacher but did not know that I was erring. The course taught me quite a lot of things that I actually thank the team for informing. I learned a theoretical and practical foundation that necessitated me in having appropriate teaching methodologies at my personal disposal. However, there seems to have been some excessive focus on the different theories of language teaching that might leave some prospective TESOL students confused and unsure which approach to implement. In addition to this, in most cases, the theories that are taught were pretty up to date which pretty much left me prepared for the classroom. I also learned that teaching is a very practical and intuitive activity, which is best learnt through direct interaction with students; it is a trial and error process of constant adaptation. Real-life teaching experience, correct theoretical implementation, and cultural exposure are fundamental components of being a well-rounded foreign language educator. In this course, I also learned matters of speech. There is a need to understand that a successful class should start with a warm-up herein referred to as the engage phase. Students must have a background of what they are supposed to learn through indicating the lesson objectives which should be clear. If a student is late, there is no need to humiliate them but rather find a friendlier way to do so as portrayed by the teacher in the second video when he said "we are late" and he was not even looking directly at the student who was late. A successful class should have a point where an exercise is done to see if the students understood it. This course also equipped me with the skills of drafting a lesson and also using different types of lesson methodologies like the straight arrow and the boomerang. Conclusively, the course was generally productive as stated above with the information and skills that I thought were pretty much constructive. It takes a willing teacher and willing learner to earn rich results. The course clearly stated how important speech is in our daily lives as anyone mistake would lead to having the wrong meaning after all. I was taught how to construct a simple sentence using proper grammar. The first grammar unit is typically concerned with classifying and identifying different parts of speech. The unit also indicated that there are different types of nouns, for example, common nouns, proper nouns e.t.c. I further managed to know that descriptive words like ‘black’ are adjectives, two different types of articles; indefinite and definite, ‘doing’ words are identified as verbs, adverbs add meaning to the action. I was informed that gerunds are typically words with –ing added to them or rather the –ing is the gerund. The course also indicated that the behavior or personality of the teacher greatly affects how the class is going to proceed.
