5 Mistakes I Made My 1st Year of Teaching ESL

As crazy as it sounds to me, I’ve now been teaching ESL for ten years. With a milestone that big, it’s caused me to reflect and think back on what I was like as a teacher when I first started. Spoiler alert: It was not good.

I’m pretty sure I made a thousand makes—per lesson—my first year teaching, but here are the five biggest mistakes I made as a first-year ESL teacher.

1) Not preparing enough material

This mostly came from me just not knowing how to plan lessons. And it probably didn’t help that I either had incredibly bad textbooks or no textbook at all. Each Sunday night, I would sit in my apartment trying to come up with a list of activities that were somehow related to my topic. I never had a structure, and since I didn’t really know how to plan lessons, I would come up with a list of activities that looked long on paper, but never lasted me until the end of class. And when I rang out of material with twenty minutes still on the clock, I would remind myself to add in more “filler” activities, like review games or vocabulary drills that still never ended up being enough.

Now, I can easily think of enough activities to include in my lessons (especially since I started following my outline—link to that article here: https://www.atlasteaching.com/lesson-planning/howtoplananesllesson). But I also always include at least one backup activity, just in case the lesson goes faster than I expected. Making sure I always have more than enough material makes each lesson actually useful, and it also gives me peace of mind in class.

2) Forcing students to come to the front to present

Oh, I could go on and on about the mistakes I made with having students present. When I first started teaching, I was given the advice to “have students make a conversation, then pull them to the front of the room to perform their conversation for everyone.” In all honesty, it’s not a bad activity idea. Students can benefit a lot from that type of structure. It just didn’t really fit my style of teaching, and I also didn’t have enough wisdom to know how to handle situations when students didn’t want to present or were shy. I ended up wasting a lot of class time just encouraging students to get up and present, and trying to make sure everyone was paying attention caused me a lot of stress.

Now, I realize there are tons of ways to have students “present” their work that don’t necessarily require a pair of students coming to the front of the room to reinact a conversation. I’ll have pairs present their conversation to other pairs, or have one group discuss a topic with another group. Instead of having students repeat their conversation word for word, I might have them turn to a new partner and create a new conversation. If I want students to present in front of the class, I give them advance notice. Or, they could just practice for practice’s sake, without having to formally present in front of the whole class.

3) Focusing too much on having fun

Sounds like a misnomer, right? Most people probably make the mistake of not having enough fun. As a foreign teacher in China, it’s kind of my job to have fun. Most schools view a Chinese teacher’s English class as being the “formal class,” and the foreign teacher’s class as being more like a lab. Students are just supposed to have fun in class, get the chance to actually practice speaking, and learn a little about culture. But that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t have taught more during my first year. Let me give an example. One of my topics was “medicine,” so I came up with the idea of having students make a conversation that involved going to the doctor for an insane disease. Each group was given a crazy disease, like “My skin is turning green,” or “I can hear animals speak.” Of course, students had a blast acting out these conversations. But looking back, I know students knew how to say phrases like “I’m sick” and “I don’t feel well,” but they didn’t know how to describe symptoms, and they always mixed up the difference between “cough” and “sneeze.” My students probably could have benefited from what I considered to be a boring, ordinary conversation between a doctor and patient.

I focused too much on answering the questions, “What do the students think is fun?” and “Will they think this is interesting?” While it did help train me in creating fun atmospheres, there was very little focus on things like scaffolding or helping students improve.

Now, I ask the question “Will students think this is interesting?” along with the question, “How will they improve from this?” I make sure students get a balance of both fun and practicality in my lessons.

4) Being too strict

I got a lot of bad advice my first year of teaching, and this was one of them. So many people told me I had lay down the law in my class and really keep things under control or students would go crazy. That made me walk into the classroom in defense mode. I was expecting students to misbehave and was hyper-vigilant when I didn’t need to be. It caused me to start the semester with walls up, focusing on the potential behavior problems, rather than focusing on students.

Now, I walk into the classroom excited to see my students, and if students misbehave, of course I intervene. But I don’t expect the worst from my students and act on the defensive. And, I do teach adults, so I have the freedom to trust them to act like adults.

5) Not finding disciplinary measures that fit my style

Like I said, I got a lot of advice about being strict from the first day. Now, maybe for some people, this works for them. But for me, I never really felt comfortable being the strict enforcer right from the get-go.

One piece of advice that was given to me was to take away a student’s phone if I caught them using it. For middle school or high school, that would be perfectly fine. But I always felt uncomfortable saying that to a college student. I much prefer getting on their level, explaining to them that they are adults, and if they choose to use their phone in class, I record it in my attendance tracker, and their grade would suffer. Sticking to a super strict, public display of discipline never felt comfortable for me, and it lead to me looking like I was bluffing when I actually had to follow through with my strict policies.

Now, I clearly explain my class rules and what I expect of students on the first day, and remind the class of that periodically if needed. If a student is misbehaving in class, I’ll remind them of the rules and remind them of the consequences. Sometimes that means calling them out in front of the class, and sometimes that means speaking to them privately during or after the class—it depends on the student.

So those were the top five mistakes I made in my first year of ESL teaching. Of course, there were way more than five mistakes that I made! But hopefully this will help give you some guidance if you’re starting your ESL teaching journey.