You’ve dodged the chain school traps, you’ve got yourself a good name for your shiny new English school, and you’ve even got a few new students signed up. There’s just one small problem, a little voice that keeps you up at night and wakes you before dawn with the cold sweat of realisation that there’s one more question, let’s call it THE QUESTION that you can no longer avoid forming on your quivering lips.
It’s a question that doesn’t get answered often enough. You can end up in a teaching job, with, if you’re lucky, an outdated textbook thrown in your hand, and it feels too late or too unprofessional to point out to your boss that nobody has actually ever answered THE QUESTION, quite possibly because nobody has ever told your boss the answer and it becomes an emperor-has-no-clothes game of chicken, so you don’t mention the one thing you really need to know.
Or, you find yourself accepting a request to teach your neighbours’ kids and there’s no place left to run to, no one to turn to and ask THE QUESTION.
What is THE QUESTION? You know, that most basic of questions that simply never gets answered adequately enough. Are you ready? I’ll speak slowly:
How exactly do you teach an English lesson?
Let me give you the tried and trusted method that I’ve been using, and truth be told, all good language teachers have been using a variation of, whether they’ve been aware that was what they were doing or not.
Read any textbook on how to teach and you’ll get swamped with jargon and capital letters. I’m going to reduce all that down to just three letters, and they are all the same one for simplicity’s sake. Let’s call it Patrick’s 3Ps of every lesson, no matter the size of the class, the ability or the age of the students. Are you ready? Here it is:
Present
Practice
Play
OK, what do I mean? Let me go through them.
Present. Here I mean you present the language, you show what it is you want your students to be able to say. If it’s kindergarteners and you are teaching them to say “I can swim” and “I can read” (like in this lesson), you might have three or four flash cards with pictures showing examples of “I can” expressions and you’d say the words after each card. The key here is you are “modeling” (showing) the students what the language is.
Practice. Here is where you get the students to repeat the target language (“I can swim”). The key is you have enough repetition of elements with just enough differences so that the kids can begin to figure out the meanings and forms for themselves without even realising it. For example, saying “I can swim” followed by “I can read” and “I can ride a bicycle” helps the kids not only to pronounce the new vocabulary, but by repetition they can realise the “I can” element remains the same while the activity “swim” or “read” changes. They have begun to understand the language intuitively without anyone using the words “modal” or “verb” or any grammar term.
Play. Your students now have a weak understanding of the new target language (in this example “I can swim.”) Now you want them to experiment with the form and make it part of their own arsenal. This is what I mean by “play”, encourage them, often by questions and answers, to bring in other words they might know. “Can you run?” “Yes, I can run.” “Can you fly?” “No, I can’t!” and so on. With children, you might literally play games here to both practice the language and expand their understanding.
What about for adults? The same principles apply, but you may not have to formally get them to repeat what you say or play a game. In this lesson (a book review of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express), you might “present” key vocabulary before or during reading the text, “practice” the writing questions and then “play” by using the speaking questions to get the students to use the vocabulary they have learnt in the lesson.
Do you have to follow the 3Ps in order? No, not necessarily, although the natural tendency is to follow the pattern of present, practice and play in that order. But you could reverse it and start with play to see what the students need to learn, present any new language and then practice it, for example.
Is that all you need? No, there’s more to making a successful language lesson, but if you cover the 3Ps you are well on your way to having a good one.