1. After Jane worked out for an hour at the gym, she was exhausted.

2. Larry backed up his friend who was accused of violating the traffic law.

3. The company backed out the joint venture when it realized its budget is limited.

4. This weekend I really had my heart set on meeting my parents in my hometown.

5. That company will have to sell them out if its competitor is developing better products

6. When a new product catches on, stores should order more of them to sell.

7. I don’t think that Felix is cut out for parenthood because he ignores his baby whenever talking on the phone.

8. Instead of throwing out newspapers and plastics, people should collect and recycle them.

But, in the real world, students and parents simply look at test grades in terms of their future (or their child’s future). They want high grades and care less about whether or not the tests adequately assess communicative language skill.

But, as I mentioned in a comment on another post, if we have the flexibility to manipulate the weight of our grades, we can try to increase student motivation and help lower level students make better overall semester grades and make more parents happy.

The formal tests can count X% of the overall grade and other work like portfolios can count a higher %. The English department can create rubrics that place a greater emphasis on alternative assessments like portfolios and place less importance on test grades.

Also, textbooks like ours focus on the use of portfolios and other means of assessment, because the authors believe that by doing the work (by doing the process), students will not just earn a grade — they will slowly gain in their capacity to use the language.

And if those alternative activities do help students increase their communicative language skills, they should do better on the formal tests also.

Especially, while I am teaching the text, comprehension part, the delima before me is should I continue using English to the students in the states of not knowing whether it is right or wrong.

This is another benefit of doing a significant amount of pair and group work with classes:

Group and pair work requires less talking by the teacher:

the students do most of the talking or written or reading work while the teacher moves around the room to monitor their progress, answer questions they might have, and control class discipline.

Through group and pair work, students gain more opportunities to use the language and teachers get the opportunity to speak less and act as a guide or facilitator of language learning.

You can also take comfort in the fact that even native-English speaking teachers make grammatical mistakes when they talk to a class, because when we speak in our native languages, we often don’t speak in complete sentences, and we “jump around” a lot in a conversation as our brains start to think about more than one thing at a time, and we make occasional grammatical mistakes.

That is the nature of oral communication.

Mistakes in speaking by an EFL teacher can cause the students to make the same mistakes. That is an issue to keep in mind when teaching, but that can’t be helped when the teacher is a non-native speaker. You are going to make mistakes: But, if you speak mostly in English, you give the students exposure to English-language use by an advanced user of it (you, the teacher), and by using pair and group work, you will speak less and thus make fewer mistakes in front of them.

I’d add that, due to the spread of technology around the world, the Internet is a very good place to find material that might gain student interest and be useful for practicing English.

Many of the textbooks I’ve seen and used in the US for ESOL are “content-based” textbooks: Each unit and each individual lesson will focus on some topic that might interest most students:

For example, there might be a unit that uses texts and multimedia materials concerning “sports” or “astronomy” or something else. And it easy to see that what the creators of those textbooks believe is that —- the English-language content of material is not as important as material and activities that generate a lot of motivation and participation in using and absorbing the language.

In short, the textbooks focus more on “the process” students use to engage the authentic language material than they do trying to input language “knowledge” into the student’s brain.

For example, I introduced trainees to the Oxford University Press ESOL materials series called: Bookworms:

I gave a handout with several pages to show how difficult or easy the starter or Level 6 books might be for your students back in Seoul.

The handout also included the back page that is in every one of the Bookworms books for every level:

The back page shows what parts of language each level focuses on – like the Starter level will use the present tense much more than other tenses and another level of the series will include material that use the passive voice in telling the story.

In other words, each level in the series is designed to familiarize students with certain parts of the language (grammar and so on) but in an inductive way. And they leave it up to the teacher to decide if they need to use supplemental material that more directly focuses on the parts of speech to go with the exposure they get through reading the Bookworms storybooks.

One reason why teacher training textbooks like the one we use in class stress pair and group work so much is that —- they believe such activities generate more motivation which in turn helps control the class in terms of classroom discipline/management.

On the other hand, these same textbooks on teaching say that a teacher who wants to use pair and group work should be ready to allow a limited amount of “chaos” in the classroom, because pair and group work in a communicative classroom will generate a significant amount of “noise” and can also be ruined if you have too many “disruptive”/”bad” students in the class.

In short, books like our textbook highly encourage the use of pair and group work, but they do recognize that the method can cause some problems in some classroom contexts.

I would not go to the extreme that they do when they say we should “never” focus directly on grammar instruction, but I do believe grammar instruction should be limited in favor of other methods that use an inductive approach.

I believe that for beginners and elementary school students, and I also believe that for adults:

It is easy to get lost or to even confuse yourself when you try to explain a grammar rule in depth. Even a native speaker can easily get lost. I would bet money that most of you would say the same about trying to explain Korean grammar in details to Koreans. I’ve seen plenty of American teachers get lost in defining grammar in ESOL or straight English Language Arts classes.

I think providing examples is better and perhaps using a visual diagram. For advanced students, I’d advise spending much more time reading, reading, reading as a way to gain correct grammar usage than I would advise them to buy a grammar book and study it.

Studying grammar by itself is not bad. It is helpful. But, is it the most valuable use of the limit amount of time EFL teachers have with their students?

I don’t think so.

I think the inductive methods that involve lots of reading and speaking-listening are more effective in the long run.

Maybe in the senior year, or in preparation for a test like the TOIEC or TOEFL, a heavy focus on grammar for a couple of months is OK as test preparation, but if a student is going to be studying Korean for many years, like they do in Korean public schools these days, I think the best way to prepare them for those standardized test is to —- build up their communicative language skills:

If the students become better and better at active communication (in speaking and writing), they should make a high score on any of those tests mentioned above.

To illustrate my point – look at Latin:

I took Latin in high school, because it was a foreign language option that did not require me to learn how to speak or write in it.

Latin is a “dead language” now. So, even high school teachers who have been teaching it for 20 years or whatever — can’t use it to communicate.

Korea is not an ESL country. It is an EFL country, but there is plenty of exposure to English as a language of communication for Korean students to use the inductive grammar learning methods that involve communicative activities and lots of reading.

1.Choosing & using authentic materials.

Constructing authentic articles. : Among some guidelines for choosing, interest to age group should be considered, I think. In a video clip, the teacher is using realia:Ordinary objects. Actually she used dolls, clothing or she can let students bring their favorite things from home and say about them. In my case, I like to use puppets that I can make quickly using paper bag, students like them very much.

2. Printed text:books, magazines, brochures, newspapers

In the vedio clip, students make an album about their own tourist guide and remains them at their school and the future students can continue them. It’s very impressive to me.

3. Images: photographs, maps, charts, drawings, posters, bulletin boards

In the vedio clip, there are so many useful works in the classroom. And we can experience Mr. Autry’s classroom decorations. But in Korea, we don’t have our own classroom. So I envy them very much.

4. Multimedia: radio programs, audio or vedio files, animation, form of documentary

Our Korean students like using internet. we should learn more technology about computer and modify them.