Abstract:

Do you remember your EFL classes at school? Were you engaged or distracted in your class? It did depend on how your class was managed by your English language teacher. So how should the EFL class be organized so that students were engaged and not distracted? The authors of this paper have tried to give the answer to this crucial and relevant question related to the current challenges in constantly changing educational settings. Today there are a lot of teaching techniques based on the use of modern technologies that can increase students’ motivation and engagement in EFL class. One of them is the ESA method – a method of sequential activities – which was first proposed by Jeremy Harmer in his book ‘’How to teach English’’. The purpose of this study is to substantiate the importance of working out a general strategy for conducting EFL class with the use of the ESA method. For this, there has been designed a teaching model based on the ESA principles that are presented below. The teaching model consists of three phases: E (engage) – warming-up (teaching materials and methods used: games, humoresques, visual aids, mimicking technique); S (study) – learning new things (teaching materials, methods and approaches used: supplementary materials, the PPP method, independent work of students in and out of the classroom); A (activate) – practicing English (methods used: dramatization, role-play, creation of advertisements, essays and poems composing, discussions, debates, etc.).

The researchers have come up with the following ESA principles to be guided in EFL class:
1. The duration ratio of each phase should be: Engage – 10 min, Study – 15, Activate – 20.
2. The flow chart of the lesson, teaching materials and tasks must be consistent with the ESA method.
3. Arousing students’ interest and influencing their emotions by addressing to their experience should be provided.
4. The teacher’s ability to spontaneously shift students’ attention to various speech activities should be utilized.
5. Resorting to a variety of associations that allows retaining the target language is recommended.

The offered teaching model includes training and test exercises aimed at facilitating teaching and learning processes for the formation of students’ language proficiency by using the ESA method.

The leading research methods used by the authors in the study are a theoretical analysis of scientific literature, a content analysis of pedagogical and psychological literature, and a pedagogical experiment.

The practical output of the research consists in the compilation of a number of copyright tasks for each phase of the teaching model. This paper discusses issues and practices of the studied model and offers general recommendations for the teaching staff.

Keywords:

EFL class, ESA method, ESA principles, ESA teaching techniques, teaching model.