PRACTICE

Practice is an absolutely crucial part of almost any ESL lesson.

Our purpose in language teaching is almost always to build students' skills. When they are communicating in English, they will need to use English grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation accurately and fluently, but they will have to focus on what they are saying, not how to say it.

Therefore, if they are to communicate successfully, their language skills must be developed to the point where they can use them naturally and automatically, without even thinking very much about them. That takes plenty of practice!

Building skills is very different from teaching content. For example, if you were teaching history, you would probably teach content. You would teach your students about history. You would expect them to understand history, but you wouldn't usually expect them to go out and make history.

In contrast, you do expect your ESL students to go out of class and use English. That's the whole purpose of the class. They need to communicate. If they are to do that, you must build their communication skills in class, and that takes practice.

To summarize, don't confuse skill teaching and content teaching and merely teach your students about English. Give them plenty of opportunities (in and out of class) to practice their English skills.

This practice should take many forms. For one thing, it needs to be varied just to keep students' interest high. Too much of the same kind of practice can be boring and reduce their motivation and enthusiasm.

This practice also typically follows some sort of progression. One type of progression goes from guided practice (where the teacher controls the students' responses) to free (where the students choose and create what they want to say). Another type of progression is based on a classification of language learning activities in three categories:

MECHANICAL practice activities are teacher controlled. Students merely follow instructions or a model. An example is a repetition drill. Mechanical practice activities are good for some purposes (e.g., teaching accurate pronunciation). However, they quickly become boring, and they cannot be used at all for developing many other language skills.

That's why we need other types.

MEANINGFUL practice activities may also be teacher controlled, but the students are aware of the meaning of what they are saying. That also allows them to have some control over what they say.

In COMMUNICATIVE practice activities students choose the language they will use and the meanings they will express. (These choices are usually based on knowledge and skills gained in earlier presentation and practice activities.)