Bonjour Tout le monde (Hello Everyone),
Bethany here, and I LOVE TEACHING ESL! Teaching ESL has been a passion of mine since I began teaching in early 2015. At the time, I had just relocated to Suwon, South Korea and worked for an after-school academy. I use what I learned from these two years with my current students: Chinese children who I teach online. These two job opportunities helped me learn what to expect from non-native English speaking students and assisted in forming my professional goals.
The first goal is to connect with my students; this makes the classroom a more enjoyable place for everyone to learn. My second professional goal is to remain humble and allow my students to teach me; there’s a lot I’m still learning about the English language and various cultures. My third goal is to be prepared for every class; even if I teach the same material multiple times, each group of students is different and should receive adjustments to match those differences. This relates back to my first goal of connecting with and knowing my students. Similarly, I highly recommend Zeichner’s list of key elements for effective teaching for ethnic- and language-minority students.
My students loved Minions, so I was a minion for Halloween.
Bethany Blount 
Good evening Bethany!
I am working towards my ESL licensure but have little to no experience with any teaching methods or pedagogy. I look forward to your insights and knowledge this semester to help inform my teaching.
It’s really interesting to me that you teach online. I’d be really interest in hearing more about your experiences with that mode of instruction.
Hi Amanda, you’ll learn a lot in the ESL program about methodologies and pedagogy as there are whole classes dedicated to these topics. The books for those classes are super helpful for all teachers though (99 Ideas and Activities for Teaching English Language Learners with the SIOP Model and 50 Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners). The latter has more comprehensive descriptions, steps, and examples, but I prefer the former for its variety.
I would definitely prefer to be in a physical classroom with students, but I enjoy the challenge of teaching online. The classes I teach are 1:1 and the company I work for creates the curriculum for me and thousands of other teachers to deliver. With this mode of teaching, I’m always thinking of ways to use gestures (TPR) to give the words and sentences meaning. This has been very helpful in classroom discussion and demo teaching. Good luck with your studies.
Bethany,
I too am interested in learning about your experiences in online teaching. I know that I never feel as connected with online classes, and was wondering if you had any strategies for increasing student/material connections for online classrooms. Also, I think that it is awesome that you were able to travel and gain experience working with students from different countries and cultures.
Hi Daniel, most of my success has come with being highly animated during my lessons. The classes I teach are 1:1, and the vast majority of my students are 5-8 years old. Finding ways to connect the material to them is definitely helpful, but being so young and early in their English learning, asking questions they can answer and aren’t part of the lesson is a hard balance to find.
My time abroad is what convinced me to go back to school for my teaching license.
Hey Bethany! I would love to here more about you experience teaching ELA students, and I must say I totally envy your experience because in the long haul having that experience will help you when your in those situations, I have yet to face that obstacle but I look forward to it. It is so awesome to have traveled to different countries working with students. I too look forward to the journey one day.!
Hi Shakayla, my time teaching ELA was with students aged 8-11. While they didn’t enjoy all of the stories, asking them questions to connect the stories to their lives definitely helped them care more. I had minimal control over the lessons since the curriculum was designed around a storybook and workbook. Printing pictures to represent the characters and/or key events in the story also helped the story come alive. My students usually loved seeing what pictures I would bring in.
Hello Bethany,
As I stated to our peers, I apologize for the late response, I’m an amateur to the blogging world and didn’t really know how it worked, but here I am! Thank you for your thoughtful response on my post. All I got to say is WOW I am jealous of you. That is so cool that you are an ESL teacher. My question to you is, how many languages do you speak? Also, where is the coolest place in your opinion, that you have been to?
Morad
Adorable photo!
Thanks!