What make a perfect ESL teacher?

Based on my own experience of being an English learner for approximately 15 years and an English tutor for several years recently, this post is written with the purpose of expressing my private standpoints about 05 most indispensable factors for any English teachers as a second language (ESL teachers) to complete their job in an outstanding manner.

In my opinion, 05 necessary elements that make a great ESL teacher include: excellence, responsibility, passion, sense of humor and innovation.

1. Excellence

An excellent ESL teacher should be a teacher who has appropriate professional qualifications with her job. This is assessed based on her abundant treasure of English knowledge and her attractive English teaching methods. For example, an ESL teacher who teaches English Communication needs to be someone with good English pronunciation and intonation. Besides, she has to make all efforts so as to create a real English communicative environment inside her classroom so that all her students can get access easily and naturally to her lessons as well as practice and improve their English communication skills.

2. Responsibility

A responsible ESL teacher always prepares her lesson plans carefully. Concretely, before the lesson starts, it is her habit to read through the lesson in the textbook and summarize the main points her students need to know in the lesson. Besides, designing some extra activities that help students inspire more with the lesson is also one of her favorite job. When the lesson happens, she tries her best to make the lesson understandable and she never ignores any questions and attitude of her students. Moreover, she provides her students with some progress and final tests to check up her students’ abilities to point out their strong points and weak points as well.

3. Passion

Without an enthusiastic passion, an ESL teacher can never be successful in her job and she may easily feel disappointed. The reality is that not all students can master their English due to some limitations. For instance, students who do not have good capacity of English find it too complicated and hopeless to understand and adapt their knowledge of English. They may have some unavoidable manifestations such as ignoring the lesson or dropping out of the class. Therefore, the real challenge of an ESL teacher is to make students who dislike English and are afraid of English feel confident in themselves and believe that they can improve their English if they really want to. To do this, it is compulsory for an ESL teacher to talk directly to her students in a friendly and cooperative attitude. She had better listen to her students’ voice to understand their difficulties and aspirations. Then, encouraging them by pointing out their ineffective ways of learning English and giving them some beneficial strategies is a valuable action. Honestly, only patient ELS teachers with a big passion in her job and a truthful love for her students can behave in those humane ways.

4. Sense of humor

English language, like any other languages, should be taught and learnt in an exciting and humorous air.  The nature and function of English is to convey the messages hidden in English words through form of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Hence, to teach English language is to build up active spaces of learning English in which English learners can comfortably study and use their English. Provided that an ESL teacher only teaches in an old and boring method, all her students may feel asleep and disappointed. To make her students impressed in her lessons, she is hoped to be a humorous person with a confident style and a smiling-face. She knows how to invent some funny stories or makes some exciting bodily languages related to the lessons to attract her students.

5. Innovation

English has been an international language for many decades and the job of teaching English as a second language to people at many countries have been paid a lot of attention until now. Years after years, a series of traditional and modern method of teaching English have been studied and applied to help English learners master their English. Therefore, an innovative ESL teacher should constantly update the new effective methods to adapt in her classroom by source of Internet or other useful materials. The outdated methods should be replaced by the further ones in accordance with the conditions of each classroom. More simply, an innovative ESL teacher should try to change her teaching method constantly to be suitable with each group of students at all levels. For example, teaching English vocabulary in written words may make students bored and easily forget. Then, why don’t ESL teachers use some pictures or illustrations or body languages to describe the new words in a more creative way?

In general, if all ESL teachers try to do better job in teaching English to their students, there will be more excellent English learners. Each ESL teacher has their own experience and I would like to receive all your comments here so that we will be able to improve ourselves to be excellent ESL teachers and learners!

By Thanh Huong