One of the main goals of an ELT teacher to achieve in his daily routines is to use as much as possible the target language which is in our case English. This routine language that is used by ELT teachers on a regular basis during their teaching process is referred to in the relevant literature as classroom language. It is mainly related to giving instructions such as "Stand up", "take out your books / pencils", "sit down, please", etc. Teachers can exploit this opportunity of these daily routines to minimise the students' use of their mother tongue and to maximise the use of the target language and increase its use by students. This makes the ELT classroom setting more authentic.
It is novice ELT teachers that usually are not well prepared and trained to handle and deal with this quite sensitive area of English teaching and learning when they start teaching. This post and others to follow describe how classroom language can be used and suggest some tips for novice ELT teachers for employing classroom language. This first blog post presents the appropriate classroom language for starting a lesson.
Teacher: Good morning, Good afternoon, Hello, Hi
Students: Good morning, Good afternoon, (teacher's name), Hello, Hi (teacher's name)
