Ninjas!

Last Friday was our second teaching assignment. A group on basic-level English students was brought in (voluntarily) to act as guinea pigs for our 20 min. mini-lessons. This week was a vocabulary based lesson with new words centering around a theme. I thought to myself, what would English students want to learn about? The answer was quite obvious: Ninjas. So my lesson was all about ninjas and included new vocab words for them like Stealthy, to Spy, Assassin, and Disguise.

The current EFL techniques are very interesting and very exciting when done well. They're also very hard since I can only speak English in the classroom since it's supposed to be an immersion environment for the students. There are two main parts of teaching a new word: eliciting, or pulling, and CCQs, or concept check questions. Basically an English teacher cannot give the students anything, but must pull the language and concepts from the associations that already exist in the students' minds. It's like Rosetta Stone but much more active and faster.

My best piece of eliciting was for "disguise." First I pulled out a picture of the Muppet, Animal. I asked, "Who is this?" (Animal.) Then I grabbed a cut-out of a classic pair of glasses and big nose disguise, and asked, "Who is this?" At this point I got what every EFL teacher wants to hear: the epiphany "Ah!" Next, to drive the point home and get the students talking more, I held up the disguise and asked, "So what is this?" They answered, putting together the word written on the board with the concept, "That's a disguise." Then I ran the CCQs. These serve to fine tune the meaning of a new word with comparisons and such.


It was a very active lesson. To make sure they understood the word "Stealthy," I asked one student to show me stealthy and had him creep around the room stealthily. Apparently the two main goals for a language institution are, "Are the students talking?" and "Will they come back?" A professional EFL teacher must aim for 60-80% student talk time (vs. teacher talk time). We had to reach 50% student talk time is VERY lofty when they don't know the language and I do. I totally hit the mark!