I have taught English as a Foreign Language in Taipei public schools for 3 years now. Through my teaching experience I have gained valuable knowledge as to best practice teaching strategies and how to get students to have fun learning English. Unfortunately, there is no magic principle or full proof lesson plan. Only hard work and a can do attitude can make for successful teaching. That being said, there are a number of teaching tips and strategies I have learned over the years that can make EFL student learning far more effective and impactful.

Especially true in Elementary classrooms, but also very helpful in High School is to have clear rules and routines. Having games and activities in the classroom are a great way to get kids involved in their learning, but the learning can be overshadowed by the fun and chaos if there aren’t rules and routines in place for students to follow. Have clear, defined, and practiced routines for students so the focus can be on the learning. Without these a class can devolve and too much time is wasted spent trying to answer questions, control students, or organize the class. Having teams each with designated roles is a good start. Students thrive when they know what to do and how to do it and can flounder when there is too much freedom or the roles are not clear. Every grade that I teach uses a slightly different system such as how my 5th graders are in teams of 4 or 5 and my 3rd graders are in teams of 3, but every class and every grade has a system. Each team has set roles that always stay the same. This makes organizing tasks and keeping focus much easier as I can tell number ones to put away the ipads, number twos to collect the papers and number threes to push in the chairs. It also makes classroom management easier for me as I can manage the 5-10 groups instead of having to manage 30 individuals.

Finally, the most important aspect of effective EFL teaching in Taiwan is to always keep trying and always keep learning! Not every lesson is going to go well, not every day will have perfectly behaved students, and that’s ok. All we can do is keep trying our best, keep trying to improve our teaching, and use all resources available to us to learn new and better ways to teach our students. Use those resources we have to help build our skills and our teaching toolboxes. Some of my best lessons and ideas came from discussing teaching with my fellow foreign teachers in the Taipei program. Use your coworkers, use the internet, use student feedback to help give you ideas and craft amazing lessons. You’re not a soldier on their own in the quest for successful learning. We have more options today than ever before. Use those tools and resources around you, meld those ideas with your own style and concepts to become the best teacher you can possibly be. During a conference of foreign teachers I was enlightened on how to make a Google Poly to have an expedition for my students. Thanks to this fellow teacher I then made my own Google Poly for a National Park lesson and was able to have an incredible interactive lesson and scavenger hunt using the ipads and VR technology. This lesson was great and allowed my students to see and interact with the material in an all new way and continue to find learning English to be fun and exciting. This was only able to happen because I worked with other teachers and was able to share ideas. Being open to talking with our coworkers can open up our teaching worlds to include things we had never considered before, and our teaching is better for it.