Remember the rule of 25% TTT and 75% STT? In case you dont know what Im talking about, it means that a teacher should talk only 25% of the time during a good ESL lesson. TTT = Teacher Talk Time, and STT = Student Talk Time. In the early days of my ESL teaching career, I found this impossible to achieve, in fact I found it really difficult to get students to speak for 25% of the time! Have you found the same problem? Do you have a solution? Maybe this is one that will work for you.

The methods employed by teachers in the modern second language (L2) classrooms are based on the various beliefs that an individual teacher has about language, language learning and language teaching. These beliefs are reflections of L2 theories about language acquisition and learning that, like the methods employed, have changed considerably over recent years. There has been a drift away from a teacher centered style of pedagogy towards a communicative approach to language learning. This is in order to prepare students for effective real word communication in the TL. To bridge the gap and examine the relationship between theoretical approaches and practical applications of modern L2 teaching methodology, some kind of framework is necessary.

What is the relationship between Memory and Attention in the classroom? As a teacher, it is important to maintain the child's attention, but does memory have a co-existence in this field? Attention is seen as being important because, "we do not pay close attention to much of the information to which we are exposed, typically only scant mental processing takes place, and we forget new material almost immediately".

Are we transitioning from a teaching centered system to a learning centered system...should we be?

Teaching is always a dynamic activity. It unfolds a world of knowledge and information, experience and erudition (Chakrabarti, 1998). Effective teaching requires more than straightforward teaching methods. Teachers need to know their students well and be able to adapt their teaching styles to a particular classroom and to individual students. (Elliott et al, 2000).

If you are a teacher who finds that "nothing works" to manage some students, this article may help. It's way past time for you to learn about ODD, Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

Academic dishonesty includes cheating and plagiarism, the theft of ideas and other forms of intellectual property that occur within an educational setting. In high school, a standard penalty for academic dishonesty is a failing grade, while in college it can result in expulsion. The most widely spread forms of academic dishonesty are cheating and plagiarism.

Much has been said and written lately about providing students with choices. I'm all about any methods which will improve student involvement in class, giving them ownership in their learning. There are many ways to give students choices, options, or just to provide random results and change up the monotony.

In recent years, language teaching has focused on the learning process rather than the teaching of the language. The emphasis is not only on linguistic competence of the language learners but also on the development of their communicative ability. In order to develop the learners' communicative ability, the teacher needs to create a scenario to teach the target language in a vibrant, active and interesting manner.

The children you teach are already learning, but would you like to help them even more, especially those who seem to be struggling? It's no secret that some children learn much faster than others and that this soon leads to imbalanced levels among classmates.

This is a short follow-up to a previous article on the viability of virtual worlds as language learning/teaching platforms, in specific Second Life. Focus here is the use of SL (Second Life) as a component of blended learning. http://eslarticle.com/pub/articles/english-as-a-second-language-esl/virtual-world-scepticism-792.htm

Your students are deathly afraid of making mistakes and looking stupid in front of their peers. Failure hurts...especially at school...especially in front of their friends. Were you ever humiliated in front of your classmates? I was. It still hurts!

Anchor activities are student centered activities that are designed to extend and review already learned skills. These activities are ongoing assignments that are self-directed. In other words, the students work on these activities independently throughout a given unit.

In order to make a language class successful one has to try to match its content with various methods aiming to make studying exciting and engaging. The usage of modern technological equipment ought to be taken in consideration when preparing teaching materials for a language course.

I am always amazed at the range of ability levels of my students within any given class. Within one 8th grade class I may have students who struggle to read and write while at the same time have students (within the same class) who are reading and writing on an upper high school level.

Anyone who has ever taught using the technique of presenting the language, practising it in a controlled way and then giving students the chance to use it in a free communication production activity will know that it is far from a perfect method, and some of the legitimate attacks on its theory and practice are...

The focus in schools today is to raise achievement among our students. While that is an admirable goal, I suggest that schools evaluate what they are already doing well. Then, get rid of those less important strategies and focus on those that are really working.

What's this -- classroom assistants must learn to do nothing? Is this crazy talk or what? No, not crazy -- totally serious. It's is often extremely beneficial when managing children's behaviour to stand back and do nothing.

Overall, the main way in which Montessori children differ from traditional students is that Montessori children love to learn. They do not memorize facts and figures for the purposes of passing a test or pleasing adults. It is that passionate love for learning which separates Montessori students from traditional students.

The reason I like the end of the year so much is because it is such a clean break. At no point during the regular school year do I feel anything but an impending sense of doom every day when I get home from work. I am always behind and playing a game of catch-up.

You already know your subject better than anyone else, and you are ready to share your knowledge. Have your knowledge respected, and your instruction remembered.

Thanks to a lot of research, it has been found that creative thinking can be taught and learned. So as teachers, we should be encouraging and developing creativity, but this is often not the case.

An important responsibility of an ESL teacher is to create an effective learning environment for learning to take place. This involves both actions and the decisions of the teacher. The actions are those things that are done in the classroom, such as rearranging the chairs and desks. The decisions relate to how and when these actions are implemented.

In recent years a debate has developed over which approaches to structuring, planning and implementing lessons are more effective. Theorists and practitioners are constantly arguing about how language acquisition takes place and how best to facilitate this. Many approaches and methods have been developed which have had a substantial impact on language teaching.

Excellent instructors know the power of metaphor, analogy, and story. They engage in elegant leverage by using something their students know well in order to introduce, explain, and anchor that which is being taught and learned. Additionally, systems thinking is rife with metaphor, analogy, and story. The simple diagrams of systems thinking serve to sketch reality, using circles and arrows and graphs we know and understand to create images that represent abstract ideas and complex relationships.