A Peek into ESL

Following Tweets from Busy Teacher Twitter account i was an eye-opening experience for me. Although I have seen and encountered some Tweets before but Twitter have never came to me as a useful tool to learn and great resource to teach. Busy Teacher briefly describe itself as  "Free printable worksheet for busy English teachers", but I found much more than that. 

Since I worked as an English teacher in China before, my mindset for English teaching was more or less limited to EFL (English as Foreign Language) context and thus it has been somewhat difficult for me to think outside the box. teaching English in ESL context could be so different than teaching English in an EFL context that I could not imagine how to handle a class in which students don't have shared first language with each other and with me, especially a class with lower English proficiency. However, Busy Teacher give a language teacher as me an opportunity to peek into ESL context with various free and shared resources. There are a good number of worksheets posted or linked to for learners in different levels. Those worksheets, for example, gave me a taste of lesson planning and class activities in a ESL classroom. The differences between ESL teaching and EFL teaching very obvious to me were that ESL teachers have much more tricks in their teaching regarding learning activities. They also tend to use more pictures, images, and other non-verbal cues to enhance the communication between teacher and students, or, I would say the interaction between learners and the language itself. The diversity of the contents of the worksheets meets the need for viewers with different age groups, L1 backgrounds and teaching objectives. So it is not only limited to ESL teaching, but rather great resource for English teaching with different purposes or in different contexts. 

Above, I just took the worksheet resource as a specific example for how useful this Twitter account is to me, what I could learn from it and what I can use the the resource for in the future. In fact, worksheets are one of the many resources I could find from Busy Teacher. There are many learning activities and tips in English teaching constantly posted and shared. Most of them are very creative, and teachers can always make changes to the games and learning activities according to their classroom dynamics and students learning needs.