TEFL

December marked my second year volunteering! During this time, I’ve been fortunate to have been under the tutelage of immensely skilled, nurturing teachers. Spurred by my tutoring experiences and a desire to someday teach abroad, last September, I decided to pursue my TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate.

For the past five months, I have been a student in Hamline University’s TEFL program. I would enthusiastically recommend this intensive program to anyone; the curriculum, the professors and my classmates have all been superb.

An additional, tremendous benefit of this program is the 40 hour practicum included in the course. Since January, I have spent two evenings a week at Neighborhood House, located in the Paul and Shelia Wellstone Center in West Saint Paul, where I teach, observe and give feedback to my peers as we teach. We work with an intermediate class of about 20 learners, most deriving from Spanish-speaking countries, along with a few students from African and Asian nations.

I team taught my first lesson with two of my peers and was responsible for reviewing and introducing new material for a lesson related to family vocabulary. I started with a mingle activity. Students were given a grid with sentences like “I am a mother” with different family words. They had to go around asking people if they were a _______. The activity went well, but next time, I would probably just have the grid squares say “mother,” “father,” etc, because the students were capable of producing sentences themselves.

Next, I created a family tree with pictures of my own family and used that to review family words. This worked well and got the students engaged in asking questions about my family. I introduced using have/has by asking the class questions about my family tree: “How many sisters do I have?” I demonstrated has by asking students questions about their families: “How many sisters does Mario have? Mario has three sisters.”

To me, this lesson emphasized the importance of teaching grammar in a contextualized setting. By utilizing visual aids, I found that learners are able to engage with the subject matter in a tangible way. Soliciting answers from the students about their own families encourages language production and builds community within the classroom as learners share about themselves. While my lesson was by no means perfect, it was illuminating to see the importance and value of teaching in this manner.