I've been teaching English as a second language since 2002 and I was really young when I started doing it.
Though I had been trained to teach English, my first class was not what I had expected. My students were old enough to be my parents or even grandparents.
No training can prepare you for real life. To me, there is nothing like practice. It is in the classroom, or in my current case on a Skype call, where we discover our students' needs and difficulties and how to address them.
I remember learning that students would have "heart attacks" when we started teaching the Present Perfect, for instance, but though it is a complicated verb tense, especially to Brazilians (we don't have this verb tense in our native language), what I realized is that Simple Present was not as easy for my students as I had anticipated or been trained to expect. Most of my students make mistakes when using this tense, probably the same amount of mistakes they make when using Present Perfect.
Sometimes I hear my students say things like "I'm like to travel", I'm work for the government", I'm go to the gym twice a week" when they should say "I like to travel", I work for the government", I go to the gym twice a week."
I guess this happens because the first thing most students learn is the famous Verb To Be and they probably think saying "I'm" is the same is saying "I", so they just stick verb to be everywhere.
Maybe Verb To Be should not be the first thing to be taught.
Another thing they struggle with is when the subject is not a pronoun. They will say things like: "My mother and my father works for Unilever". In their minds "my mother" is "she" and "my father" is "he" and when it's he or she we put the letter S in the end of the verb. Other times they think the S in the end of the verb represents the plural and since there are two people, then they must say "works".
These mistakes are often made by adult learners and I sometimes wonder if this happens because of anxiety. Adult learners put a great deal of pressure on themselves and that might get in their way. There is no fun in learning for most of them.
With that in mind, when I teach the Simple Present to adults I always have them talk about the things they do for fun.
I ask them to describe their weekends, to talk about celebrations, such as Easter, Christmas, New Years and they seem to enjoy it a bit more than talking about their routines.
If you are reading this and you are a student, how about writing about your favorite celebrations. What do you usually do? Where do you usually go? Who do you spend them with? What do you usually eat?
(You could even record yourself speaking and send your audio to me. I'll be happy to check it for you. Send it to suporte@elearningforall.org)
If you are a teacher reading this, I'd love to read your comments on this topic and your suggestions.
