How I teach depends on my audience whether I am tutoring one person or teaching a group of persons. Firstly, I try to find out why they wish to learn the language, how fluent they would like to become and how hard they intend to work to achieve their desired level of proficiency. If the student or group's goal is to be able to understand, write or speak fluently on certain topics, then I plan c...
How I teach depends on my audience whether I am tutoring one person or teaching a group of persons. Firstly, I try to find out why they wish to learn the language, how fluent they would like to become and how hard they intend to work to achieve their desired level of proficiency. If the student or group's goal is to be able to understand, write or speak fluently on certain topics, then I plan classes around those areas. If I am dealing with a company, I try to find out what is their desired level of proficiency for their employees. Whatever area I am teaching on, I usually start the class by providing the vocabulary for it and, along the way, I progressively teach on verb conjugations and tenses etc. Then I proceed to give examples of what I have just taught. The next stage is to give some exercises orally to see if the students have understood what I just taught. After this I give some writing exercises to allow them some more time to think out what they just been taught. The last step of the class is giving homework. From my experience on learning to actually speak the language while living in Venezuela (my mother's homeland) I tend to show my students how differently or similarly things are expressed in both English and Spanish. Take for example, the use of prepositions. These can greatly differ from Spanish to English. No matter what I am teaching, I am constantly building progressively on what the students have already learned so it helps to reinforce vocabulary, verb conjugations etc. My classes are highly interactive so my students are expected to think on the spot when I throw questions at them like: Translate this sentence into Spanish or English! Of course, this is after having covered all the necessary vocabulary, verb conjugations and grammar rules to be able to do so. I have also designed some games and charts to make teaching the class more interesting. If my group of students are more than six persons, sometimes I allow them to work in groups for developing conversations skills among themselves.