Teaching Strategies

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Adapting Lesson Plans

When teaching english on the internet, many online tutors usually tailor their curriculum and lesson plans to meet the needs of their students. This article looks at ways of adapting lessons for online tuition use.

If you find that you have to follow a set textbook, there may be times when you have to tweak and adapt the textbook lesson plans to meet the needs of your students. Following an approved textbook may be an easy way to conduct classes, it may be on par with set policy, but it may fail to meet the students actual learning needs and goals. In addition, it places unnecessary restrictions on teachers from exploring and developing their unique teaching style - teaching styles that may be based either on personal preferences or on current research and educational beliefs. Most companies are open to adapting lesson plans, though for significant changes you may have to talk to your supervisors.

To be effective in teaching english on the internet, it is important to spend about 30 minutes to 1 hour before class reviewing what the learning needs of your students are. Think about your students interests and language learning goals, and how you can adapt what you have towards meeting these needs. It is also important to incorporate materials that target the four language skills - reading, writing, listening and speaking. While in an actual classroom setting it is easy to simultaneously combine the four language skills, it is more difficult to do so when teaching online. One way to include these skills is to incorporate them into your agenda so that you can focus on them.

Teaching english in an online learning environment stimulates the students visual and auditory senses, making learning and retention a more efficient and productive process. Writing tends to disrupt this process. Listening, reading and speaking on the other hand can be easily integrated into an online classes. Unless you hold special classes that are solely devoted to teaching english writing and grammar, you can usually set written exercises and long reading passages for homework. At the next online session, you can than review your students homework and go through any questions that your students may have.

Setting High Expectations

Your students may have families to support, they may have an already demanding work schedule or a very busy lifestyle, but language acquisition does not happen naturally and effortlessly. Many students will express a great desire to improve every aspect of their English, so setting high expectations is not an ideal but a must. It may mean that your students need to set aside 20-30 minutes of their time each day to complete their homework; it is difficult, but not impossible. Parallel to providing higher expectations, you should also set aside sufficient guidance and support for your students. This may mean setting aside about 10-15 minutes of your class time to review and talk about any problems that might may have risen.

Online learning can be a productive and rewarding experience both for the tutor and learner. But unlike teaching in a classroom, teaching english online requires that you adapt your lessons, and set high goals and expectations in order to bring out the best in your students.

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