ITTO Specialist Certification Program

• Lesson Planning demonstrates how to plan an effective ESL lesson. It focuses attention on identifying the skills that are the focus of the lesson. It also demonstrates and practices five stages for an effective lesson plan: warm-up/review, presentation, practice, application, and evaluation.
• Total Physical Response demonstrates how to conduct a lesson using the Total Physical Response (TPR) approach. This approach is based on the principle that listening naturally precedes speaking. During TPR activities, students listen silently to commands and respond nonverbally.
• Focused Listening presents listening skills as strategies to bridge the gap between classroom English and the English encountered outside the classroom.
• Early Production comes from the Natural Approach, which focuses on meaningful communication rather than the form of the language. Early Production emphasizes comprehensible input and is characterized by activities that require one or two word responses from students.
• Dialogue/Drill is an outgrowth of the audio-lingual method. It is used to develop speaking skills and pronunciation accuracy. The Dialogue places language structures in a context. The Drills emphasize the teacher as a model students mimic to practice structure, pronunciation, vocabulary, and intonation.
• In Information Gap activities students do not have the same information. They must communicate with each other in order to close the gap in their information. The technique emphasizes the importance of real communication in the learning process.
• Role Play provides students the opportunity to deal with the unpredictable nature of language. The technique develops students' skills choosing verbal and non-verbal language appropriate to the time, the place, and the person with whom they are communicating.
• Problem Solving helps develop communicative competence and critical thinking skills. It uses students' concerns and problems as a subject for discussion. Students learn to make informed decisions based on a variety of solutions and their consequences.
• Beginning Literacy shows teachers how to group preliterate, illiterate, semiliterate, and literate students in the same classroom to teach reading and writing skills. Various grouping strategies and instructional approaches based on students' back grounds, goals, interests, and learning styles are presented as important aspects of literacy instruction.
• Language Experience is designed for preliterate, no literate, and semiliterate students to learn to read what they can already say. The technique emphasizes the concept that print represents spoken words, and the importance of getting students to recognize their own words before recognizing other kinds of reading.
• Life Skills Reading provides practice in extracting information that will assist the reader in performing some task for work or in daily life. It uses items such as ads, bus schedules and employee handbooks for its content.
• Narrative Reading involves reading in paragraph form, as in textbooks or newspapers. The technique focuses on global understanding and on the development of reading skills.