let the students learn more about you, their instructor. If you follow these steps, you will start to develop a sense of community in the classroom right away.
Get to know the course
Make your students feel at ease and introduce them to the structure of the course and the materials you will use. Give them a syllabus and the course schedule and detail the methods of assessment. Your students will be comfortable if they know what to expect and also what you expect from them. If you are using a course book, give your students a short quiz about it. Ask them basic questions about the units, the grammar points, or even the number of pages. Add a few questions that they have to search for to make them really look at the book they’ll be using. Let them work in teams and race to find the answers. Activities like this on the first day can make your class feel closer together.
Get to know the students
The almost infamous “find someone who…” activities that many language courses open with are one way to discover more about your students. They also encourage the students to mingle together and speak English confidently on the first day. A “find someone who…” activity is a worksheet that requires students to ask each other questions to find someone who matches the information on the sheet. Students might be asked to find someone who is married or who has children. You give them the information and show them how to turn it into a question. When the activity finishes, students can share any interesting information they learned about each other. This activity is even more successful if you can prepare it with actual personal information about your students.
Name games are another way to learn more about your students and to make your class feel personal. If you have a small ball, it is easy to make a name circle. Put your students in a circle and throw the ball to someone. While you throw it, say your name and ask for theirs. They can respond with a thank you and their own name. This continues until everyone has played catch together. Another idea is to toss the ball while saying your name and an adjective that begins with the same letter. The adjective will give everyone something to remember the person by.
One of the most important ways to get to know your students is to conduct a needs analysis. This sounds intimidating, but it’s as simple as preparing an interview form for them to answer in pairs. With this interview, you are trying to discover their level of English, their prior study, their expectations, and their reasons for studying English now. This knowledge will help you further develop the course and tailor it to the needs of your students.
Let the students get to know you
At this point in the lesson, the students have learnt a little about the course and each other, but their instructor is still a mystery. You can become more accessible to your students and begin to build a rapport with them by letting them
know more about you. Lie detector is an interesting activity that will tell your students about your past and your experiences. Simply write your name on the board and several facts branching out from it. Tell your students that three of these facts are true and three are false. Have them work together to figure out the false ones. They can ask you questions about the facts and your life. This is also a nice speaking activity for the first day.
The answers game will get your students thinking about language in a new way. Give them a list of answers that relate to your experiences and have them work in pairs to think about the questions that could prompt those answers. Let the pairs take turns asking you questions to try and elicit an answer from the list. Turn this activity into a game and reward points for each successful question.
A successful ESL course is based on great communication. If you follow this guideline, your first lesson will have you start to form a relationship with your students and let your students know what you expect from them.