How To Teach ESL to Beginners

Teaching English-as-a-second-language to complete beginners is both a challenge and an opportunity. When learners have no previous experience with the language, it will be incredibly obvious if they do not begin to make progress.

This provides a special opportunity, however: the lack of previous English experience/knowledge makes it very easy for a teacher to quickly find out which teaching methods get immediate results.

The blue areas in each diagram represents an entire language. The yellow areas is the portion of the language that the learner is capable of understanding based on their relevant knowledge (represented by the orange areas).

A teacher might very reasonably ask the following:

“Why does the COMPLETE BEGINNER’S diagram have both a small orange area and small yellow area? Aren’t they supposed to know zero English?”