Learn to TEACH English with TECHNOLOGY. Free course for American TESOL students.


TESOL certification course online recognized by TESL Canada & ACTDEC UK.

Visit Driven Coffee Fundraising for unique school fundraising ideas.





Texas ISD School Guide
Texas ISD School Guide







Articles for Teachers

How to Teach a Good English Lesson
By:Eric Hammer

One of the most difficult things to do successfully is to teach an effective English lesson. The reasons are numerous and some of them have to do with knowledge of teaching methods. However, even for those who know how to teach, English lessons can be difficult to teach because your students often will consider them to be boring. They don't have to be though. You just need to know how to teach it properly and be prepared for it.

Read everything you can about the subject you plan to teach. If you plan to teach the basic parts of speech for example (noun, verb, adjective, adverb), make sure you know your subject well. Very well. If you are not sure, your students will sense it and you will have a harder time teaching your lesson.

Come up with a great motivation. Let's look at those parts of speech again. They're pretty boring on their own. But what if you make it into a game where you give kids a set of words, including all four basic types of words and they need to come up with crazy titles for a story using at least one of each.

The kids will then be using the words in the right way without realizing what they are doing. Once they've done that, you can then challenge them and ask, what if I took away all the adjectives? Is your title exciting just with nouns? Come up with your own idea to show why what you are teaching is important not just to you but to them.

Make a lesson plan. If you are not familiar with the basics of writing a lesson plan, you should learn more about that before you attempt to teach a lesson. However, the basic parts of a lesson plan include:

Aim: What you hope to accomplish, usually in the form of a question
Motivation: Getting the kids excited about the lesson
Plan: The steps you will take to teach your students your lesson
Homework: This one is self explanatory
Follow Up: What you will do in a future lesson to link back to the previous lesson.

In the case of this lesson plan, it should include what the children will need to know about your subject. Looking again at our example of basic parts of speech, you should include not only what a noun is, but also what a proper noun is. In addition, you should be prepared to clearly explain the difference between a verb and a noun.

Teach your lesson. Go through your lesson plan, let the kids experience your knowledge of the subject and make sure that you have enough time to get through your lesson. You will need to accommodate children who need extra time, especially if your lesson includes a written section (quite common in an English lesson). It is best to have some activity ready for the students who finish early, for example, you might have a work sheet where kids need to check off is something is a noun or a verb. You should also be prepared to explain things to any students who need it. This is especially important if you are doing more advanced English lessons, such as the various tenses (past simple, present simple, past progressive, present progressive). These things can be very confusing for students (and sometimes even for their teachers) so you should budget adequate time to explain them.

Evaluate. Think about what you taught and how you can do it better next time. What went wrong? What went right? Why did things go wrong or right? It is especially important for an English lesson to consider where the lesson seemed to drag. Again, while your ultimate goal is to get your students to understand the information in your lesson, a sub goal should be to make sure that they understand why English lessons are important and that they will look forward to learning English the same way they do when their science teacher has promised some cool new experiment.


Go to another board -