ESL job interview question: How do you use differentiated instruction?

Recommended answer:

Differentiated instruction allows for the students to work at their appropriate levels.  I subdivide students into groups of four and distribute to them different types of exercises, according to their abilities. 


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ESL job interview question: If a student hits another student, what would you do?

Answer

I would immediately report the incident either to the Principal or to the Deputy Principal, and would document the event. In addition, if the situation is serious and threatening to health, I would restrain the child and I would ask for the security officer at the school to escort the child out of the classroom. I would also contact the parents.

I would actually try to protect the children involved. Hitting a student is not acceptable and such a case needs to be dealt with quickly. 



To answer this question properly, you can also talk about your discipline philosophy...

ESL job interview question: What do you do to accommodate your students with IEPs?

Recommended answer:

Before I accommodate every student student with an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) I arrange discussions with the students' parents in order to learn about their specific needs. This allows me to design an effective program that addresses specific students' needs. In addition, I document regularly my evaluations of the students' academic behavior. 



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ESL job interview question: What was the most difficult situation that you have encountered in your career?

Answer

You should give an example of a challenging situation in which the final outcome was positive. Try to emphasize your positive qualities such as professionalism, independence, critical thinking skills, ability to work as a part of a team, etc.  


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ESL job interview question: How long would you expect to work for us if hired?

Recommended answer

You should not try to give a specific answer to the above question, e.g. 

(1) I would like it to be a long time, 

or:

(2) As long as we both feel I am doing a good job. 




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ESL job interview question: What have you done to improve your knowledge in the last year?

Answer

You should mention your self-improvement activities that are related to the job you are applying for. Actually, a very wide variety  of activities can 
be mentioned as positive self-improvement. Prepare your answer in advance (in writing).




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ESL job interview question: When can you start?

Answer

Do not hurry. Do not tell that you can start tomorrow. Perhaps there is a two or three months’ notice regulation or contract with your current employer. You should not hide the fact from your potential employer that you are still very much needed in your present position by your current employer and you are required, according to an agreement, to give him a three months’ notice. This will increase your value in the eyes of your potential employer.


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ESL job interview question: Can I assume you are interested in other positions that might open up in this district?

Answer

Yes, I would be interested in other jobs if you do not hire me for this one.

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ESL job interview question: In what ways do you communicate with parents on a regular basis?

Answer

I develop a classroom website which is updated weekly. On this website parents can find our weekly theme, any homework that is required, and information such as spelling words or upcoming assessments. I also include links to online enrichment activities. 

In addition to the website, I send daily notes home to parents in each student's communication log. 

I also phone home on a regular schedule (biweekly or monthly, depending on the student and the family's preference) to discuss the aspects of the child's education that are going well. This makes it easier to call home when there are problems, because I already have an established relationship with the parents.

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ESL job interview question: How will you go about implementing school-wide rules?

Recommended answer:

I usually post a version of school-wide rules in the classroom and then break them down into simpler versions, coupled with pictures, to promote comprehension. I discuss these rules with my students: what they mean and why they exist (=to make school safe, to make sure everyone does their best, etc). To gain access to reinforcement, students must follow all school and classroom rules in addition to meeting the individual behavioral goals developed for each student.



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ESL job interview question: What would you do if a student refused to sit down?

Answer

During my most recent teaching position, at a school for students with special needs, this was a common problem. I had one student for whom nothing we could offer her at her desk was more reinforcing than simply being up. Because this was her most motivating reinforcer, I had to find a way to gain control over it; if she could freely wander the classroom whenever she wanted, she had no reason to come back to me and engage in work.

I placed work materials at eye level around the classroom. These were materials she had previously mastered -- things like color ID, sight word reading, etc. When she would leave her desk and run to the window, she found sight words taped to the window and we reviewed them until she chose to leave the window. When she climbed under the teacher's desk, she found shapes to review. When she hid behind the door, she discovered community helper cards to identify.

Meanwhile, at her desk were fun activities like stickers and her favorite coloring book. When returning to her desk became more reinforcing than wandering the classroom, she began spending more time appropriately seated. 

Once this change occurred, I was able to slowly fade in more academic tasks at the desk, interspersed with fun activities, until remaining seated at her desk was a part of her regular routine. I made "roaming the classroom" a reinforcer choice and allowed her to wander undisturbed only when she had engaged in a work task and earned all her tokens. What had once motivated her to tune out her teachers and leave her workspace now motivated her to remain in her workspace and engage with her teachers to earn her desired reward.

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ESL job interview question: What would you do if one day before a test you realize that eight of your students are extremely confused and have not understood anything from the current unit?

Answer 1

I would have been conducting informal assessments and listening to my students so that the situation would not arise in the first place. I would be surprised if by doing so, that eight students would not understand anything.

Answer 2

I would hope that it would not come to that point and that I would know if those eight students did not understand anything. I would ask to see these eight students for a tutoring session before the test.




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ESL job interview question: If I walked into your classroom on a typical afternoon, what would I see going on?

Recommended Answer 1:

You would be greeted by an eager group of students who enjoy practicing social interactions with a variety of visitors to the classroom. One or two students would be seated with me at the group table, working on an academic task. Other students would be independently navigating their environments according to their picture schedules, completing independent work stations to reinforce academic, leisure, vocational, and life skills concepts.

Recommended Answer 2:

Several students would be engaged in independent learning centres designed to reinforce academic and vocational skills. This would leave me free to work one-on-one or in small groups with students at the group table. You would probably get a chorus of "hello"s and "how are you"s from a class of students eager to practice social interaction. It's likely that a few of us would be engaged in activities that, on first glance, look mysterious -- exchanging paper slices of pizza, for example, or matching labels to cereal boxes. Many of our classroom activities are designed to teach vocational skills for the future.

Recommended Answer 3:

You would see a bright classroom where the students are actively engaged in cooperative groups, using manipulative, as I monitor and listen in on conversations about what the students are learning. Posted around the room is the schedule, student work, helpful posters, and on the back wall I have strategies I need to work more on, the schedule so I can manage the time better.

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ESL job interview question: What would you do if a student refused to sit down?

Answer

During my most recent teaching position, at a school for students with special needs, this was a common problem. I had one student for whom nothing we could offer her at her desk was more reinforcing than simply being up. Because this was her most motivating reinforcer, I had to find a way to gain control over it; if she could freely wander the classroom whenever she wanted, she had no reason to come back to me and engage in work.

I placed work materials at eye level around the classroom. These were materials she had previously mastered -- things like color ID, sight word reading, etc. When she would leave her desk and run to the window, she found sight words taped to the window and we reviewed them until she chose to leave the window. When she climbed under the teacher's desk, she found shapes to review. When she hid behind the door, she discovered community helper cards to identify.

Meanwhile, at her desk there were fun activities like stickers and her favorite coloring book. When returning to her desk became more reinforcing than wandering the classroom, she began spending more time appropriately seated. Once this change occurred, I was able to slowly fade in more academic tasks at the desk, interspersed with fun activities, until remaining seated at her desk was a part of her regular routine. I made "roaming the classroom" a reinforcer choice and allowed her to wander undisturbed only when she had engaged in a work task and earned all her tokens. What had once motivated her to tune out her teachers and leave her workspace now motivated her to remain in her workspace and engage with her teachers to earn her desired reward.

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ESL job interview question: Tell us about your discipline philosophy

Recommended answer:

Students in my classroom earn access to reinforcement by engaging in appropriate behavior and completing work tasks as requested. In practice, this might take the form of a set number of tokens a student must earn before being rewarded, or of a behavior contract a student must abide by to gain access to reinforcement. When a student fails to behave appropriately or to complete the tasks assigned her, she is unable to earn these rewards.


If a student engages in inappropriate behavior that is designed to meet a legitimate need, I teach a more acceptable replacement for that behavior. For example, if a student screams because she is frustrated and needs help with an academic task, I might teach her to say or sign "help" or to hand me a card with the word "help" written on it instead of screaming. When she requests help appropriately instead of screaming, I immediately reward this behavior by providing the requested help. If by requesting help appropriately, the student has also met the requirements of her behavior contract or token system, this enables her to access a tangible reward in addition to receiving the requested help. 

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ESL job interview question: Are you a team player?

Recommended Answer:

As a special education teacher, I actively seek input from parents, regular education teachers, related service providers, and other involved persons to ensure consistency of instruction. I look for ways to help my students be successful in a variety of environments and with a variety of caregivers and professionals.



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ESL job interview question: What do you think about parent involvement?

Recommended answer

Parental involvement is vital to student success in all classrooms, but particularly - in special education classrooms. Students with developmental disabilities need consistency and routine in order to master and generalize concepts. 

If concepts taught at home can be reinforced at school, and concepts taught at school can be reinforced at home, we greatly increase the chances that the concepts will be generalized. Teachers and school principals should encourage parental involvement. 




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ESL job interview question: How do you make learning fun for students?

Answer

Learning is fun when it is meaningful and when you are not afraid to take chances. When I take chances and I model for my students that I'm not afraid to make mistakes, it reduces a lot of the stress students feel to do everything "right." We make mistakes together, we learn from them together, and we correct them together. That's a fun and meaningful process. That doesn't sound quite right to me now, but I'm going through and answering them off the top of my head just like in a real interview.


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ESL job interview question: What do you know about Claire Kramsch?

Recommended answer:

Claire Kramsch is Professor of German and Foreign Language Acquisition in the German Department and in the School of Education. She is, in addition, Director of the Berkeley Language Center, a research and development unit for all foreign language teachers on campus. She teaches courses in foreign language pedagogy, discourse analysis, second language acquisition and foreign language literacy. Her area of research is applied linguistics, with emphasis on pragmatic, aesthetic and hermeneutic approaches to language study. She also directs Ph.D. dissertations in these areas both in the School of Education and in the German Department. 

Her major publications include Discourse Analysis and Second Language Teaching; Interaction et discours dans la classe de langue; Reden, Mitreden, Dazwischenreden: Managing Conversations in German; Foreign Language Research in Cross-Cultural Perspective; Text and Context: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Language Study; Context and Culture in Language Teaching; Language and Culture; Language acquisition and language socialization - Ecological perspectives. Her many articles have appeared in Studies in Second Language Acquisition, The Modern Language Journal, Die Unterrichtspraxis, The Canadian Modern Language Review, Profession, The ADFL Bulletin, PMLA, The Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language Culture and Curriculum.

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ESL job interview question: What do you know about Stephen Krashen?

Recommended answer:

Dr. Stephen Krashen completed his PhD in Linguistics at UCLA in 1972, and is currently an Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Southern California. Dr. Krashen is the author of more than 250 articles and books in the fields of bilingual education, neurolinguistics, second language acquisition and literacy. His publications have received numerous awards. 

In his famous publication ‘Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning' Dr. Krashen writes that 'language acquisition requires meaningful interaction in the target language where speakers are concerned not only with the form of their utterances but also with the messages they are conveying and understanding.'

Dr. Krashen distinguishes five key hypotheses about second language acquisition: (1) Acquisition-Learning Distinction, (2) Natural Order Hypothesis, (3) Monitor Hypothesis, (4) Input Hypothesis, and (5) Affective Filter Hypothesis. His five hypotheses of second language acquisition can be summarized in this way: acquisition is more important than learning. 

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ESL job interview question: What do you know about Geoffrey Leech?

Recommended answer:

Geoffrey Leech is Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics. His major fields of interest are English grammar, literary stylistics, semantics, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics and pragmatics.  

Geoffrey Leech was Professor of Linguistics and Modern English Language at Lancaster University from 1974 to 1996. He then became Research Professor in English Linguistics. He has been Emeritus Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language, Lancaster University, since 2002. 

He has written, co-authored or co-edited 25 books in the areas of English grammar, literary stylistics, semantics, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics and pragmatics. They include: English in Advertising: A Linguistic Study of Advertising in Great Britain (1966);   A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (1969);  Meaning and the English Verb (1971, 2nd ed. 1987, 3rd ed. in preparation);  A Communicative Grammar of English (with J. Svartvik) (1975, 2nd edn. 1994, 3rd edn. 2002);  Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose (with M. Short) (1981); Principles of Pragmatics (1983);   A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (with R. Quirk, S. Greenbaum and J. Svartvik) (1985);  Spoken English on Computer: Transcription, Mark-up and Application (ed. with G. Myers and J. Thomas) (1995);  Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora (ed. with R. Garside and T. McEnery) (1997);   Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (with D. Biber, S. Johansson, S. Conrad and E. Finegan) (1999);  Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English: based on the British National Corpus (with P. Rayson and A. Wilson) (2001);   Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English (with D. Biber and S. Conrad) (2002).

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ESL job interview question: What do you know about Chomsky?

Recommended answer:

Avram Noam Chomsky (born in 1928) is a Jewish American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, author of many books and political activist. He made contributions to linguistics, psychology and computer science. In the academic community he is known as ‘the father of modern linguistics.’ 

His theory of generative grammar has had a profound influence on linguistics. At present Chomsky resides in Lexington, Massachusetts. He travels much, gives lectures on politics.

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ESL job interview question: What are your classroom rules? How do you make students familiar with the rules?

Recommended answer:

My students are involved in the rule-making process at the beginning of the school year. Together we identify the components of a safe and enjoyable learning environment. Then we determine what rules are necessary to create this environment, and what the consequences should be for breaking these rules. 

The rules we identify are usually some version of the following:

• keep hands, feet, mouth, and belongings in your own space
• use kind words when speaking to others
• call others only by name
• ask for help when you need it
• give help whenever you can
• do your best work.



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ESL job interview question: What is the greatest challenge that today's educators face?

Recommended answer:

The greatest challenge is lack of student motivation. Teachers should really get into what students find relevant and apply that into their lessons.

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ESL job interview question: As a new ESL teacher, how long of an adjustment period will you need before you start contributing to the school and faculty in general? What will you do at that point?

Recommended answer:

I would start contributing to the school and faculty from the first day I am at the school. I would join committees, participate in faculty meetings, in the English Club, go to school events and collaborate with my colleagues and the parents of my students.

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ESL job interview question: How do you know how long to spend on your objectives?

Recommended answer:

That depends on the students. At the beginning, we do a KWL (Know, Want, Learn) chart to find out what students already know so we can just touch on those concepts and get into more depth of the things they do not know. A KWL chart, or KWL table, is a graphical organizer designed to help in learning. The letters KWL are an acronym for "what we know", what we want to know, and "what we learned". A KWL table is typically divided into three columns titled Know, Want and Learned. The table comes in various different forms as some have modified it to include or exclude information. It may be useful in research projects and to organize information to help study for tests.
Here is what the KWL chart can look like:

K	W	L
What students know	What students want to know	What students learned
Students write about what they know in this space	Students write about what they already know in this space	After the completion of the unit, write what the students learned in this space

A KWL chart can be used to drive instruction in the classroom. The teacher can create lesson plans based upon the interests and inquiries of the students and their needs. Using this strategy can increase motivation and attention by activating the students' prior knowledge. This allows the teacher to understand the students' prior knowledge and their interest in the topic. 

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ESL job interview question: What do you know about Vygotsky?

Recommended answer:

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896 –1934) was a Jewish Russian developmental psychologist and the originator of cultural-historical psychology. 

His most important contribution was in the field of language and thought. In his book Thinking and Speaking he established the profound connection between silent inner speech and oral language. He described inner speech as being qualitatively different from normal (external) speech. 

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ESL job interview question: How would you handle a student who is disrespectful to you?

Recommended answers

Answer 1:

I would pull this student aside to find out the problem the student is having with me and try to come up with a workable solution for us both.

Answer 2:

First, I would make sure that my lessons are engaging and that the material is at an appropriate level for them and that they are always actively engaged. If the problem persisted, I would take that student aside and ask them why they are being disrespectful to me. 

Depending on the student and what their individual needs are, I may start a positive reinforcement behavior management system with them where they receive a reward for demonstrating the proper amount of respect towards me and the rest of the class. 




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ESL job interview question: Could your strength be a particular subject you really excel?

Recommended answer

My strong point is that I can present information in a way that my students are able to understand me easily. 

I usually give age appropriate, real life examples even on difficult topics. A parent of a student recently approached me and commented how much his son got out of my lessons. He said his son came home and talked about how well I explained the subject so it was not boring and the material made sense to him. 

In addition, I have clear and standard English pronunciation and I do not speak too fast so my students can follow me easily.




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