Article

If you are an ESL teacher you probably know how difficult it can be to write a good plan for your ESL class. Very often we come to class and soon get really frustrated because the plan that we have prepared does not seem to work. Or it doesn't work with this particular group of students.

In fact, there are several useful tricks which can help you write a perfect plan that will suit any ESL class and save you from a failure. Let's discuss some of the things that can go wrong with your class. Number one is time management. It happens something like this. You are teaching a class, but soon you understand that you are running out of teaching materials before the end of the class. So you start to slow down a little bit, but still there is plenty of time left that you just need to fill in.

How come, you wonder, I have planed each activity minute by minute, so why am I running out of activities? The problem is your students can do things a little faster than you imagined. To avoid the situation when you have nothing to teach, you should always have some extra activities at hand. This way you will never lose face in front of your students.

The opposite situation can also be a problem -- the class is almost over, and you still haven't done all the activities that you have planned. While this situation is not as bad as the first one, it can still spoil your class. While planning your class, you may want to do some time calculations. If you are working with the intermediate students, you can run through all the activities yourself and then multiply the total time that you have spent by 2. The resulting figure is exactly how much time your students will need for doing all the class activities.

Other problems can include loss of students' interest, poor feedback, failure to do tasks, low class activity, refusal to participate in class activities etc.