These are some teaching tips that we hope will be a general help to new teachers or others who simply wish to brush up on their technique.

Teaching Tip 1: Pairwork/Groupwork

1. Make a list of pairs of names before the lesson starts or while the students are coming in.
2. If there is an odd number of students make a group of three but break them up later in the lesson and put them into pairs with someone else so they get more chance to speak.
3. You could put them in small groups to start with if the activity allows. You could even make the activity a competition in small teams if the activity allows, seeing which team gets the most answers right. Use the board or a piece of paper for keeping score.
4. Change the partners quite often so that the students don’t get bored with their partner. This is especially important if there is a student who isn’t very popular with the others.

Teaching Tip 2: Reading Aloud

1. Pick a student and ask him/her to read the instructions for Activity 1/2/3 or whatever.
2. Pick a different student each time.

Teaching Tip 3: Checking Understanding

1. Ask your students "Is that clear?”
2. If it’s clear, fine. If anyone says "No, can you explain that?/Can you explain again?", don’t. Ask if one of the other students can explain it.
3. If nobody understands it, go through an example step by step together. They should get it then.
4. If they still don’t get it, go through another example together.
5. If the poor things are still lost either...
• do the whole activity together as a class, if possible, or...
• give up and go to the next activity.
• If it’s a word they are having difficulty understanding, you could set it for homework and get the students to explain the meaning to you next lesson.
6. Another way to check understanding of instructions is to ask the students to imagine that you are a new student who has just come in - can they explain how to do the activity?

Teaching Tip 4: Pronunciation

1. Model the word yourself. (This means you say it in a normal way to the students). Then get the students to repeat it after you, all together like in a chorus until they get it nearly right. Don’t worry if they aren’t perfect. Who is?
2. Then model the word again and ask individual students to repeat the word after you.
3. You could put the word on the board and ask the students how many syllables it has and then practice some stress placement. Ask them which the stressed (strong) syllable is. If you know the phonetic alphabet you could write the words in that too.

Teaching Tip 5: Guessing Answers

1. When there is a list of possible answers, encourage students to guess the answers (by saying things like "There are two words to choose from and only one gap to fill so you've got a 50% chance of being right!)
2. Encourage students to look at the words before and the words after the gap to help them decide what type of word is needed in the gap. Will the answer be a verb? An adjective? A noun? In most exercises this will limit their choice of answers and therefore increase their chances of guessing the right one.

Teaching Tip 6: Stopping an Activity

1. If you have a small enough group that you can be heard by everyone, just say something like "OK, you can stop there. Well done everyone. Thank you, you can stop now!" Then give the students a few seconds to finish their sentences until the room falls quiet. Let them finish what they were saying.
2. If you have a big group so you won't be heard if you try talk over everyone then don't bother to shout yourself hoarse, simply have a certain place in the classroom where you go and stand when you want everyone's attention and go and stand in it. The students will stop talking very soon. (I stand in front of the board, facing the class which gets their attention because for the previous ten minutes or so I've been cruising round the room monitoring). You can explain to students at the beginning of the course, "When I want your attention I will stand here and you will stop what you are doing and listen to me because I don't like shouting for your attention. Is that clear"?

Teaching Tip 7: Feedback

1. Ask one of the students what the answer to the question is. If s/he gets it right, fine. If not, ask if anyone else knows the answer. (If nobody knows and nobody can guess, you'll need to give it to them).
2. In the "True or False?” the feedback questions would be: "How many of your guesses were right? /How well do you know your partner? /which of your partner's answers surprised you?"

Teaching Tip 8: Dealing with Vocabulary Queries

How to avoid doing it:

1. Get the students to read the exercise completely before starting to actually do anything. They can underline the words they don't know, or (more positively) underline the words they do know. 2. When a student asks you to explain the meaning of a word, DON’T. Ask the other students if anyone can explain it.
2. You could put the students in pairs or small groups and get them to explain the words they don't know to each other.
3.  It's a good idea to get the students to try to guess the meaning of the word from the context it's in.
4. Get the students to look the word up in a (preferably English to English) dictionary.

Teaching Tip 9: Monitoring

1. While the students are doing an activity you walk slowly round the classroom and listen to their conversations.
2. You can sit down too, if there are enough chairs, but try to sit in the background a bit or the students will direct their conversation to you.
3. Look at one pair whilst actually listening to a different pair nearby. Correct the pair nearby (which will probably make them jump because they thought you were listening to the pair you were looking at) just to keep everyone on their toes - they never know when you're listening to them so they can't ever switch off or revert to their mother-tongue.
4. Be ready to massage any flagging conversations back into life, to stop students monopolizing conversations, to stop students falling out with each other and to offer encouragement and praise where appropriate. Listen and supervise.
5. Take a piece of paper and a pen with you on your travels round the classroom so that you can jot down any howlers.

Teaching Tip 10: Error Correction

1. Let the students make mistakes. They need to. We all learn best through making mistakes. Trial and error is the name of the game.
2. Give the students time to realize they've made a mistake and try to correct it themselves. If they can't, maybe someone else can help them. If nobody can help then you can either step in and give the correct form or make a note of it for later.
3. As far as possible, correct mistakes anonymously. Do this by making notes of students' mistakes as you monitor then putting them on the board later and give the students themselves the opportunity to correct them, in pairs or small groups. If no one knows the right answer, give it to them, but only as a last resort. Anonymous error correction is a kind way to deal with mistakes. It isn't important who made the mistake originally - the point is, can the students all correct it?

Teaching Tip 11: Eliciting

1. Instead of giving information, ask if anyone in the class can provide it. When a student asks "What does this mean?" or "What's the past of this verb?" etc. say something like "That's a good question - what do you think?" Can you guess? Can anyone help?"
2. If you want to teach some vocabulary, for instance, then rather than giving it to the students, try to get them to give it to you. For example: I want to teach the word "cow". I could draw a little picture on the board. I could explain what a cow is. Or I could elicit the word from the students along these lines: "What do we call/what’s the word for an animal which makes milk and goes "mooo"?! With any luck the students will say "cow". There you go - I've elicited the word "cow" from the students. I didn't say it to them - they said it to me; that's eliciting.

Teaching Tip 12: Checking Together

1. When the students have finished doing an activity on their own, put them in pairs or small groups and tell them to check their answers together.
2. Tell the students that if the answers are the same, they are probably correct but if they are different they need to explain/justify their choice of answer to their partner - in English! They can change their answers if they like.

Teaching Tip 13: Reading before Writing

1. Tell the students to read the whole exercise first before writing anything. (This will be unbelievably hard for some students to do).
2. Once they've read it all, let them begin doing the exercise.

Teaching Tip 14: Brainstorming

1. Ask the students to think of all the words they know connected with the topic.
2. Tell the students to write them on a piece of paper.
3. Give them a couple of minutes to do so.
4. Put them in pairs or small groups to compare their vocabulary and transfer words they hadn't thought of from their partner's list to their own.
5. Or you could do it all on the board in the first place - just ask the class to give you words to write on the board. (Or give board pens to one or more students and get them to do the writing!)

Teaching Tip 15: Translating

1. Refuse to give translations for new vocabulary yourself. Pretend/admit you don't speak the student's language.
2. Encourage the students to guess the meaning of words they don't know or to ask each other for help or to look it up in a monolingual dictionary instead.
3. Explain that you are a teacher, not an interpreter.
4. Remind students that you are a teacher, not a dictionary

Teaching Tip 16: Pacing

1. Change the pace of the lesson by breaking things up a bit. Instead of simply doing one activity straight after another, allow a little time for something different.
2. You can also change the pace during a lesson by allowing time for a brainstorming session.
3. Another way to liven up the pace is to put a time limit on some activities - "You have 2 minutes for this, so get going!" Or introducing an element of competition - put the class into small groups and tell them that these are teams and the first team to finish this activity is the winner. (Prize = no homework, or something like that.) Maybe the activities which involve matching words with pictures would be a good one for this).
4. Use other material during the lesson - your course book etc.
5. Wake people up by giving them a 2 minute test on last week's vocabulary.
6. Allow silence at appropriate times during the lesson - while students are reading the questions or during speaking activities when students are formulating a response (thinking of something to say). Silence in the classroom can be a bit unnerving at first but it doesn't mean you're not doing your job - students need time to absorb information and time to think. We all do.

Teaching Tip 17: Using Dictionaries

1. If possible, give the students each an English-English dictionary.
2. Make sure they know how to use it. If not, teach them how. (If you don't know how to teach them how, see Extra Info below for some ideas).
3. Encourage the students to refer to their dictionary whenever appropriate during the lesson, though they should try to guess the meaning from the context first where possible.