ESL Teachers Are Handling These Complaints From Students
7th March 2022
Complaints about homework, peers, games-period, etc., are regular things that teachers encounter. Well, the complaints received from the students are neither formal complaints, and filing a complaint like that of a police station is not required here. However, an ESL teacher receives a lot of students' complaints regularly irrespective of they being in high school, middle school, or primary school.
ESL teaching on online platforms is quite interesting as you being an ESL teacher will come across various kinds of students. If you have a TEFL certificate of a TEFL course or online TEFL course then the ESL job market will be quite high. Teaching English as a foreign language to speakers of other languages will need you to handle common student complaints. Teaching skills involve handling students' grievances as well and hence English teachers (TEFL jobs) are taking care of students.
Every student has a different kind of problem and let's see how teachers are handling these complaints. During the TEFL certification course, teachers' training lesson plans have taught the candidates how to deal with such problems. Sometimes students have issues with the internet connection. The speed of the internet connection often depends upon the location of the students and hence, sometimes the connectivity is too slow. Teachers often come across such problems and finding out solutions is not that difficult.
Having video unmute during a classroom session consumes a lot of internet capacity and in areas where the coverage and speed are low, there will be a lot of buffers when the video will be unmuted. The English teacher can either ask the students to keep their videos mute or can send them PDF files for that day.
While some students are complaining regarding the internet speed others are worried because they are not being able to learn fast. This is a very common problem and out of 10, 6 students launch this type of complaint to the ESL teacher. To be very honest, the potential level of every student is not the same and hence the progress level is not equal as well. If possible, the ESL teacher can give extra tutor support to those students who are lagging behind.
This might be a little bit time-consuming but if given some extra effort behind these students, they can actually grow better. Home tasks can be reduced for them to some extent so that they do not get overloaded.
Sometimes the problem is not with any home tasks, internet connection, or progress. Students often feel that their wavelengths do not match with that of the ESL teacher and hence, they hesitate to get along with the teacher. As a result, the communication between the teacher and students is quite opaque. Neither the students are being able to grow properly nor can teachers deliver the best of their efforts.
In such a scenario, the teacher can have a one-to-one session with each student and listen to their problems minutely. Unless a teacher is having the idea that why students are not comfortable with him/her, the interaction will be useless. Teachers will have to understand the problem and work it out accordingly.
These are the common problems that ESL teachers having TEFL/TESOL courses certificates encounter frequently during their teaching jobs. Students belonging from the higher education department get along conveniently with ESL teachers and thus teachers tend to get a lot of complaints from them in the form of healthy conversation. The problem arises with the young learners who often hesitate to open up but then again ESL teachers put great effort into handling complaints.
Written By : Park Jin Ae