In my eyes, as an English teacher with 10 years of experience to both EFL and ESL learners, you need to be creative and patient. These two elements are essential to make a teacher successful. You need to think outside the box and incorporate various mediums to make your lessons more effective and fun. Even the simplest ideas sometimes make a lesson wonderful. For instance, one simple song can be planned in a way to teach vocabulary, grammatical points, critical thinking, speaking, pronunciation, spelling, reading skills, etc.

As a teacher you need to provide a friendly, cooperative and fun environment for your students which can be achieved by being creative and patient. 

Learning languages is an art. In fact, in my eyes, if one is interested to learn a language, even unsupervised learning will do.

It is very wide subject to talk about but , briefly , the teacher should exert a considerable effort to make the lesson interesting.This is done through variation of activities and the roles the teacher takes.Interaction is very important also and makes the students preoccupied with the topic.Choosing interesting subjects helps a lot in teaching language

Dear Maha; Thanks for your reply.

You mean that interaction and creativity are of paramount importance for teachers?

In my eyes, as an English teacher with 10 years of experience to both EFL and ESL learners, you need to be creative and patient. These two elements are essential to make a teacher successful. You need to think outside the box and incorporate various mediums to make your lessons more effective and fun. Even the simplest ideas sometimes make a lesson wonderful. For instance, one simple song can be planned in a way to teach vocabulary, grammatical points, critical thinking, speaking, pronunciation, spelling, reading skills, etc.

As a teacher you need to provide a friendly, cooperative and fun environment for your students which can be achieved by being creative and patient. 

@Bahram, I teach Biology in English to many Malay students.  For them, English is a second language, and I find that they have difficulty with sentence structures when they write a lab report in past tense and passive voice.  So I will give them 2 examples of how to write the procedures correctly.  

However for learning and recalling large chunks of information correctly in English, I use music mnemonics.  In my research on the use of mnemonics in Teaching and Learning, I found that music mnemonics were often used by students of life sciences, and students who created their own mnemonics obtained better CGPs.  I attach a video recording of mnemonics that I created to facilitate students to learn Transcription of RNA.  Thanks.

Data Transcription of RNA (video recording)

Teaching those skills through literature (i.e., literary texts)!

Linguistic is not my area directly However since i am  student of Mass communication and teach communication skills as  well as Functional Urdu (our national language in Pakistan) to my students,i have experienced that the more written exercises you assign to students in class ,the better they learn.Though it is not an innovative technique but the ideas and topics you ask them to write make it innovative and useful i-e topics of their interests, or related to latest trends etc.Similarly presentations are a good technique too.Asking them to share any of their experience or observation related to some topic or issue standing infront of the class.Student enjoy a lot when asked to make funny sentences or tell a story explaining some idioms.

While starting college study at Birzeit - Palestine in the early 1970s, one of the most effective methods that was carried out on my classmates & me went this way: the students - in small numbers - will sit in a circle as if there is a meeting & the teacher chairs the sitting raising a subject (e.g. what is your definition of happiness?). Each one has to talk (in English & not the mother tongue). The teacher will insert a new vocabulary every now & then during the discussion. At first, there were difficulties & then we found ourselves becoming more fluent within a month. Next. our teacher moved to assigning a subject to each one of us that has to be handwritten, presented in front of the class, and discussed. Within 4 months, all the class moved up several steps. To learn English, many of my teachers refused to answer any question that is asked by the mother tongue. Later on, I found out that these approaches made it more easy for me to understand chemistry subjects & in England, I became as good as the English natives language-wise. To this day, I feel very grateful to Mrs. Nadia (one of my most brilliant teachers who applied these methods).

Hi Bahram,

So glad you asked this question. My answer may sound simple, though the practice is quite complex. I believe one of the most important qualities a teacher must have is flexibility (apart from generosity). Teachers must be capable of integrating methods and classroom techniques to get the most of their students. In my case, I promote active learning through the integration of flipped learning and collaborative/cooperative learning. I implement simulations and games to provide my students with a worry-free context in which they can interact and develop the language skills. 

I attach some of my research below.

Best,

Laura

Conference Paper Scenario Design in EFL Teacher Training

Conference Paper Addressing multiple-intelligences through Tic-Tac-Toe MEMO g...

I believe that our students are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside.

My way of teaching is positive and encouraging. I make every classroom hour an exciting adventure - informative, motivating and challenging. I put myself in a students’ position and review each activity from their point of view. English is my second language and my personal learning experience helps me to anticipate most of the problem areas.

Finding cross-referencing, frequent practices & Internet Free Translation Software can be 3 enablers in helping a person to teach / learn a language.  Cross-referencing in my personal context refers to associating something (pronunciation, meaning, logics, experiences etc) that a learner has known or mastered to understand / learn the new language so that s/he can always cross-link / associate the 2 together e.g. the Japanese pronunciation "How much (pricing) is this item" is resembling to Cantonese (1 of Chinese dialects) " When is the young girl number 2 will get married?".  Others include e.g. numeric 1-5 pronunciation in Japanese are quite resembling to numeric 1-5 pronunciation in Hokkien (1 of Chinese dialects), the meaning of "knife" in Malay language is similar to a type of knife in Chinese etc.

Frequent practice / using a new language is crucial because language is like a body's muscle in which the more you use / exercise, the better it will be.  After learning / knowing a new language but if we don't practice, it will be forgotten or getting rusty when we try to use it.  I have a hypothesis in my mind - the more languages a person knows, easier for him or her to master more new languages.  May be the person already get the hang / technique how to learn any language or wants to know what is the new language equivalent to the ones that s/he has known.

I also find Internet free translation software e.g. www.babelfish.com etc. provide very useful tools to learn a new language.  They can translate sentences from 1 language to another not only in terms of writing & grammar but also in pronunciation.  I remembered working in 1 international project in which 1 of my colleagues having difficulty using English to communicate.  We found babelfish really help us to converse and understood each other effectively.  In fact through babelfish, it enhanced my curiosity to learn the particular foreign language better.  Moreover, wherever country I'd landed in which English is not the common language, picking some of the local key terms in local language through Internet is extremely useful.

I agree with Dear Azadeh Shafaei

I admire our Linguistics teacher. He had a wonderful method of teaching. He used to tell/underline the most important points of any subject with examples. Sometimes he used powerpoint presentations to convey his messages. He made everything easy with the repetition of fundamental points. I can still hear his voice inside my head. He was really amazing.