How to find out your ESL students' needs.

Course details

Do you teach EFL, ESL or another foreign language? How well do you know your students? Is what you do in your classroom based on information you got from your students?

What are we going to do? In this course we're going to look at how we can find out about our ESL students' needs so that we can help them learn. With more information about our students we can design better lessons and better activities, and, importantly, we can justify what we do in class. We want our lessons to be as efficient as possible so our students improve their English proficiency faster. These short video lectures have PDF questionnaires and surveys that you can download and use immediately in your classes to get you started. There is also a PDF transcript for each lecture for non-native English teachers.

"A liberating course for ESL teachers and their students." - Jonathan Huie

"An excellent and comprehensive course." - Carl Jones

Who is this course for? This course is part of a series aimed at teachers in general but there is a lot of help here for language teachers. This course is ALSO designed for non-native teachers of English who are doing such a great job in their classrooms around the world.

How are we going to do this? We'll work through a series of video lectures. You don't have to follow the order but it's best to view all of them at least once.

• Section 1: Introduction: Why do we need to collect information?
• Section 2: Different types of information
  • Beliefs about language and learning
  • Types of Motivation
  • Learning styles
  • Language learning needs
• Section 3: Different techniques for getting information
  • Collecting information before the first class
  • Collecting information during and after the first class
• Section 4: Putting it all together
  • Tips on collecting information
  • Potential problems and how to avoid or resolve them
  • What next?
• Conclusion

If you have any questions during the course you can always contact me. See you in the next lecture!