When considering Teacher Talk Time, we can perhaps look at the major advantage and disadvantage of the teacher actually talking. The major advantage is that you as the teacher are usually the only real model for the language, the source of correct English. So at some stages, your talking time is very important to the students. So when you?re modeling language, that use of Teacher Talk Time can be very advantageous. There are major disadvantages to overusing Teacher Talk Time, however, and perhaps the major one is that whenever the teacher is talking, the students are listening and if the students are listening, then they themselves cannot be talking. So, Teacher Talk Time reduces the opportunity for Student Talk Time. So, we should try to minimize the use of Teacher Talk Time wherever possible. How can we do that? Well, there are a number of simple ideas. We?ve already looked at the idea of using mime and gestures and here, we could include pictures. Secondly, then we need to make sure that we?re only using language that?s at their level. For a low-level group, that means, that the language available to us as the teacher, is going to be quite limited. That limited language will in itself reduce Teacher Talk Time. And perhaps the final idea for this particular list is to make sure that we avoid the use of jargon and elaboration. Perhaps the main message here is to keep it simple.
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