Introduction

As Brad Henry said: A good teacher can inspire hope, ignite the imagination, and instil a
love of learning.
These are indeed characteristics of a good teacher, and this assignment is precisely about how
to be a good teacher, but besides looking at what makes a teacher to be good, we are also
going to talk about who should talk in class, how teachers should talk to students and how
they should give instructions because a good teacher, like a good entertainer first must hold
his audience's attention, and then he can teach his lesson. (John Henrik Clarke). We will
conclude by mentioning the best kinds of lesson and how important is it to follow a prearranged plan because after all good teacher should keep the game fun.

What makes a good teacher?

There are countless views on what is involved in being a good teacher. The following
answers are representative of the many view points.
Good teachers really want to be good teachers
They try very hard and, if they let their students know they are trying hard, their students will
respect them for that. If they see that you really want to teach well then they will be prepared
to help you with that. However, they will not forgive you if they get the impression that you
dont care about your teaching.
Good teachers take risks
They set themselves impossible goals then scramble to achieve them. It is exciting to try
things that may fail. If you succeed, then you have accomplished something and if you
dont succeed, then you have learnt that you need to make some adjustments.
Good teachers have a positive attitude
We ought to enjoy, not complain about, the challenges students give us.
Good teachers try not to be cynical or negative about their students or else cast themselves as
victims. We need challenges and there is none if all we have are smart, self-motivated, hardworking, wide-awake students; these dont really need to be taught.
Good teachers do not trust student evaluations
Good teachers do tend to get very good evaluations, but they focus on the one or two erratic
evaluations that say something negative about them. They ask themselves what they did
wrong for those students who had negative marks. The not-so-good teachers tend to trust the
positive evaluations they receive and dismiss the negative ones.
A teacher must love their job. If they really enjoy their job that will make their
lesson more interesting
Teachers who look fed up or unhappy with what they are doing tend to have a negative effect
on their students. When you observe good teachers you will notice that even when they are
feeling terrible (outside the classroom) they put on a good "teachers face" when they enter
the classroom.

 A teacher should have their own personality and not hide anything from the
students so they are not only a teacher but a person as well-and it comes through
the lesson.
Students tend to be interested in their teachers-at least at first. The ones who share their
personality with their classes often have better results than those who do not.

A teacher should have a lot of knowledge, not only of his subject

A good teacher is good entertainer in a positive sense
Students enjoy being entertained and amused. However, a balance has to be struck between
entertainment and teaching/learning.
A teacher is someone who has an affinity with the students that they are teaching
Teachers should be able to identify with the hopes, aspirations and difficulties of their
students while they are teaching them.
A good teacher should try and draw out the quiet ones and control the more
talkative ones
Usually classes are dominated by bright, witty, loud and extroverted students. So its easy for
teachers to be captivated by such students. It takes more effort to ensure that the quiet, shyer
students also get a chance.
He should be able to correct the students without offending them
Explaining the students that they have made a mistake is one of the most perilous encounters
in the classroom. It has to be done with tact. The teacher has to measure what is appropriate
for a particular student in a particular situation.
A good teacher is someone who helps rather than shouts
It is important that students talk to the teacher when they have problems and they dont go
along with the subject.

How should teachers talk to students?

One of the most, if not the most, important people in the life of a student is a teacher. A
teacher's attitude, behavior, language and teaching style can do a lot to make or break a good
student.
The way teachers talk to students is one of the best crucial teacher skills, and this skill does
not demand a technical expertise.
In the book Tools for Teaching, Davis(1993) cites good teaching practices as the best way to
counter student apathy. This obviously includes the way a teacher speaks to the student.
The people who find it fairly natural to adopt their language to their audience-their young
children-are the parents. Studies show that parents use more exaggerated tones of voice, and
speak with less complex grammatical structures than they would if they were talking to
adults. Their vocabulary is generally more controlled and the attempt to make physical
contact is greater. They generally do this unconsciously. Well, teachers and students are not
the same as parents and children, but they have in common this subconscious ability to
rough-tune- unconscious simplification-the language. The truth is that the teacher is not
going to set out to get the level of language exactly correct for their audience. A good teacher
relies, instead, on a general perception of what is being understood by the students. As
mentioned above, the empathy is very crucial. A good teacher must be able to put himself in
place of those who find learning hard(Eliphas Levi). The empathy allows the teacher to
almost feel whether the level of language they are using is appropriate for the audience.
The teacher should concentrate his focus on their students comprehension as the yardstick by
which to measure their own speaking style in the classroom.
Apart from adapting their language, the teacher should use physical movement such as
gestures, expressions.

How should teachers give instructions?

Teachers must have a purpose for all the activities they organize in a class and they should
communicate that purpose to their students. (Harmer, 1991:259)
The way teachers talk to students is an important skill and its very crucial when it comes to
giving instructions because the best activity can be a waste of time if students dont
understand what they are supposed to do.
There are two general rules that should always be considered when giving instructions:
They must be kept as simple as possible
They must be logical
The age and level of the students should be taken into consideration when giving
instructions and the context also matters, they must use simple grammatical structures
and be specific. The instructions must of course also be coherent, unambiguous, clear and
concise.
Before giving instructions, teachers must do a kind of self-evaluation, asking themselves the
following questions:
-What is the important information Im trying to convey?
-What must the students know if they are to complete this activity successfully?
-Which information do they need first?
-Which should come next?
After giving the instructions, teachers should do a quick qualitative evaluation to check if the
students have understood what they are being asked to do. They can:
- Ask the students to explain the activities;
-Get someone to show the other people in the class how the exercise works;
-Ask a student to translate the instructions into their mother tongue (if all the students and the
teacher understand it).

Who should talk in class?

One of the worst things that can possibly happen in class or during the lessons, is to have a
boring lesson. And that can cause students to sleep in class, abandon the lesson before its end
or miss it altogether. In way to overcome this problem, its best to consider much
STT( student talking time), then TTT( teacher talking time). Of course some lessons may
require longer explanations from the teachers than others, and 90% or more may be devoted
to conversational activities.
Good TTT may have beneficial qualities when they know how to talk to students, how to
rough-tune their language to the students level, this gives the students the chance to hear
language which is certainly above their own productive level.
A classroom where the TV (teachers voice) drones on and on day after day, and where you
hardly ever hear the students say anything, is not one that most teachers and students would
approve of. Although TTT can be terribly overused, a class where the teacher seems reluctant
to speak is not very attractive either.
Its understandable to have much teacher talk time when providing explanations, examples
for the target language early in the lesson. Later on, they may speak less as students need
opportunity to practice the new material, their use of language should further promote
qualitative thought.

Why is talking important in classrooms?

Before talking in class, we use language to transmit ideas, to process information, and
remember, its our operating system (Vygotsky, 1962).
Student talking time is important because they are the ones who need the language, and by
being involved in English language, they can easily be able to communicate with members of
the target language community. And for that to happen, students need to be motivated and
also to be comfortable in their class with their teachers, so that they can expose their
thoughts. This interaction allows students to learn from each other, share and expand
knowledge, beliefs and views about the world, because the more students speak in English
the better speakers they become. The best lessons are ones where STT is maximized but
where at appropriate moments during the lesson the teacher is not afraid to summarize what
is happening, tell a story, and enter into discussion. Good teachers use their common sense
and experience to get balance right.

Lets consider the following negative and positive aspects during the lesson
Positive aspects:
The teacher praises the students;
The teacher provides feedback, correction, and possible guidance;
The teacher sets up or demonstrates activities
Negative aspects:

The teacher offers personal anecdotes that dont connect to the lesson;
The teacher explains the target language for too much;
The teacher speaks quickly or slowly for the level of students;
The teacher excessively uses slang and fillers;
The teacher offers too much correction.

What are the best kinds of lessons?

Benjamin Franklin once said: Tell me something and Ill forget, teach me something and I
may remember, involve me and Ill learn.
These words could probably be applied for most, if not all students, so if teachers want
students to learn, they should involve them, for an involved student is a motivated student
and a person eager to learn, and thats all a teacher could ask for, but one cannot be involved
if one is bored, and boredom is precisely one of the greatest dangers to successful teaching.
This enemy of all of us teachers and students is many times born out of the predictability and
monotony of many lessons. So, we teachers must come to understand that the learning
experience should be permanently stimulating and interesting in order to actually have an
effective learning and teaching process going on.
The best kinds of lessons would appear to be the ones with surprise and variety, this variety
means involving students in a number of different types of activities and were possible
introduce them to a wide selection of materials. For example, students spend all the time of a
lesson writing sentences, they will probably get bored, if new language is always introduced
in the same way, then the introduction stages of the class will become gradually less and less
challenging, if all reading activities always concentrate on extracting information and never
ask the student to do anything else, reading will become less interesting. The same is true of
any activity that is constantly repeated, thats why there is a need to have a number of
different tasks with a selection of different topics, the students are much more likely to
remain interested...

John Fanselows book Breaking Rules suggests that teachers need to break their own behavior
patterns, for example if a teacher normally teaches in casual clothes, he should go one day
wearing a suit. If he or she is normally noisy and energetic as a teacher, he or she should
spend a class behaving calmly and slowly, when a teachers does something like that, it
instigates surprise and curiosity and thats a great starting point for student involvement
Besides having variety and surprise the best kinds of lessons also have activities that integrate
all the productive and reproductive skills and were STT is maximized.

How important is it to follow a pre-arranged plan?

Good lesson planning is the art of mixing techniques, activities and materials in such a way
that an ideal balance is created for class (Harmer, 1991:258)
Teachers should plan lessons with variety, that is to say that they should be able to involve
students in a number of different types of activities and where possible introduce them to a
wide selection of materials, but its important to balance the teachers attempt to achieve the
goals they set for a specific lesson and the way students respond to it, and thats where
flexibility comes into play. For many reasons what the teacher has planned may not be
appropriate for that class on that particular day, so a flexible teacher will be able to change
the plan in such a situation. Flexibility is the characteristic we would expect from a genuinely
adaptable teacher.
Bellow are examples of situations where a teacher needs to be flexible and act quickly:
Magic moments-in language lessons, sometimes therere moments when a conversation
develops unexpectedly or when a topic produces more interest in the students that the teacher
had predicted and they suddenly want to talk about that topic, and because that wasnt in the
plan the teachers gets conflicted whether to let the discussion follow up or cut it and follow
the arranged plan. Its an instant decision, but if we carry on with the lesson as planned and
ignore the moment as if it had never happened, well be missing a great opportunity to have
real communication and the students might feel that the teacher doesnt respect them. A good
teacher will recognize those magic moments and know how to use them even if they dont fit
into the plan.
Sensible diversion- magical moments arent the only things that may cause a sudden change
of plan. We have situations that cause the teacher to stop and wonder what to do next. For
instance, a student might use some new grammar or vocabulary that the teacher hadnt
planned to introduce. Yet this might be an ideal moment to change the course of the lesson
and do some work on the language that has arisen, so we take a diversion and teach
something we had not intended to teach.
Unforeseen problems- however well and proactively the teacher plans the lesson, unforeseen
problems might crop up in the classroom. Students might find the activity that the teacher
prepared boring; an activity might take longer or shorter than anticipated; an activity might
turn out to be more difficult or easier than expected; the teacher plans an activity for a certain
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number of students and not as many turn up or the technology they relied on fails to work. In
any of these cases, it would be nearly impossible to carry on as if nothing had happened. If an
activity finishes quickly we need to find something to fill the time; if students cannot do what
we are asking of them, we will have to modify what we ask them to do. Harmer (2007:367)
states that forcing the outcomes in the face of obvious and changing reality within the lesson
itself and continuing with a planned activity simply because it is in the plan can be
detrimental to the students perception of us as teachers and may close off learning
opportunities which students could have benefitted from.
Good teachers are flexible enough to cope with all these situations and because they have
student-centered classes they can always adapt the lessons in order to meet their needs.
Harmer, in his book English Language Teaching, sums it all very clearly when he says that
planning a lesson is not the same as scripting a lesson. Lessons are not plays where students
and their teacher have to remember and reproduce words in a pre-ordained sequence. Nor are
they like western classical music where all the notes have to be played exactly as they are
written. A better metaphor for a lesson, perhaps, would be jazz, where from an original chord
sequence the players improvise their own melodies, inventing their own twists and turns so
that they arrive at their own destinations by their own routes. What we take into the lesson, in
other words, is a proposal for action, rather than a lesson blueprint to be followed slavishly.
And once we put our proposal for action into action, all sorts of things might happen, quite a
few of which we might not have anticipated.

Conclusion
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The Superior teacher demonstrates.
The great teacher inspires.(William Arthur Ward)
After a brief and careful reading about being a good teacher we came to the same conclusion
as Maggie Gallagher who says: Of all hard jobs around one of the hardest is being a good
teacher. Being a good teacher involves having the ability to share students feelings or
experiences by putting themselves in their shoes, it also involves teacher leaving behind his
personal problems and behave as if nothing wrong is happening.

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Bibliography

Beidler, PG 1997 What makes a good teacher? in JK Roth (ed.) Inspiring Teaching, Anker,
Bolton MA, pp. 2-12.
Davis, Barbara.1993 Tools for teaching, San francisco:Jossey-Bass publishers
Hamer, Jeremy.2001. How to teach English, Malaysia: Addison Wesley Longman limited 7th
Harmer, Jeremy.1991. The practice of English Language Teaching, New York: Longman 4th
Hedge, Tricia, 2000. Teaching and learning in the Languange Classroom, UK: Oxford
University Press
www.betterlanguangeteaching.com

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