Teacher's journal: July 2015

31/07/2015

Teaching grammar to primary learners: presentation and practice

For learners to be able to express themselves and communicate, they build complete sentence from the words they already know. For this, they need an understanding of grammatical structures

Vocabulary is a vital component of language learning. Creating a context is crucial as we teach and develop vocabulary. How to choose words to teach actively in a lesson?How to select, teach and recycle vocabulary?How to consolidate new words?What strategies to teach your learners?

Planning tasks in a lesson

How to make lessons more manageable?

How to provide support throughout a lesson?

Questioning techniques, realia and visual aids can stimulate learner contributions. It's also essential to understand your students learning styles as this can make a learning process more effective

Using Songs and Videos

Using songs and videos can be highly motivating for students. Such activities are not very challenging but at the same time can be extremely effective in learning English. However, a teacher should bear in mind that is not enough to find a song or a video. Useful exercises should be created in order to turn such a lesson into a motivating, fun and effective one

Sometimes teachers have questions about "how to do listening tasks". Here are some common questions and answers to them

Listening activities are quite often challenging for our students. So, we need to motivate them.

Here you can find lesson procedure and listening techniques as well

To make listening activities successful, a teacher need to make them true to life. In this case, the effectiveness will rise, students’ motivation and their engagement in the process as well

Some people say that today due to technologies we don't need writing at all. Computers can correct our mistakes. Is it right? Do teenagers need writing activities? If so, how can a teacher make them motivating?

The way reading is taught in many classrooms seems fairly fixed. In reality, do we actually teach reading at all or are we more focused on testing our learners?

Reading aloud is quite often neglected by teachers. However, it plays an essential role in teaching English

Learners can find reading quite challenging. But appropriate texts and activities can make this process motivating. It’s important to explain openly to your learners how reading in English can help their language skills

Doing reading activities may be difficult. Students can be bored, uninterested and so on.

Here are some common questions and answers to them

How can we do more than just give opportunities for speaking and actively develop learners’ speaking skills?

Speaking may be challenging for many learners. Although, some teenagers are eager to speak in their L1, if they need to speak L2 they can remain silent. So, a teacher should motivate such learners to speak English.

Here are some suggestions how to encourage learners to speak English in class

It can be difficult to create a good speaking lesson. Here are some tips to take into consideration

Motivating speaking activities for lower levels

These activities are all designed to motivate lower level learners to speak in pairs or small groups.

Students are not always in the right mood to speak and to help them, to encourage them to speak, teachers can use little things that will help students

Do you want to speak better English?

An effective and motivating communicative environment

The classroom should be perceived as a memorable place where problems are dealt with efficiency, where self-esteem is high and where good behaviour is praised.

Using language in the classroom should be understood as a path for communication. It's essential to create an organised and constructive classroom and to provide your learners with opportunities for real communication

A communicative approach should be focused on learners. Children needs should be taken in cosideraton and should be of high importance. How a communicative classroom caters for these?

A communicative approach is becoming more and more popular. Is it effective? Does it really help our students to learn the languege? We want our learners to be active participants in their learning and a communicative classroom can help

If you are fond of literature and if you enjoy British literature, read this post for some ideas how to learn more

It often happens so that a student knows grammar, some vocabulary items and can even understand what another person is saying in English, but can hardly speak. It is difficult for him to use his grammar, vocabulary knowledge to make a sentence or an oral text. What can we do to fix the situation?

These are some suggestions of how to learn new words with you students

If we are to introduce new vocabulary, teachers need to bear in mind lots of factors. In this post, you will find:

- ways of getting meaning across;

- what students need to know;

- ways of teaching vocabulary;

- ways of renewing and recycling vocabulary

Your students can be visual and it means that a teacher should use visuals aids to help them to remember and understand new material. Visual aids can be applied when you teach grammar too.

Working with learner language

The extended production of language by learners, whether spoken or written, is often viewed as the end-point of a lesson, but it can be placed at the centre of our planning and teaching

Testing and assessing are different. But a teacher should both test and assess.

Online tools can be fun ways to make otherwise ordinary exercises motivating. Blogs, WebQuests and podcasts can be more complicated projects which need a bit more time and thought. But they’re well worth it!

Cuisenaire Rods is a nice tool to use in a classroom with your learners and there are many ways to use it.

In class a teacher may have students of different abilities. What can they do to enable them to learn English and to help others, more skilled students, to raise their level too?

It happens quite often that some students are faster than other at doing task you gave them. What can we do in this case? How can we motivate our students and don't let then get bored? FFF (Fast Finishers’ Folder) may come in handy.

Teenagers are more active at the lessons if they have some input into a situation. In this case, they are more motivated

Boys and girls learn differently. At the same age, their brain is at different stage of development

If you teach English to teenagers, this work may seem challenging, as the important thing to achieve success is to motivate your teens. How can we do this? First, we need to understand teenagers, especially twenty-first-century teenagers.

To help our students to love English, teachers should motivate them to learn it. One of the ways to do this, is to describe the English language as an interesting one full of curious things.

Here are some tips that can be useful

It is out of question that establishing a good rapport with your students is crucial. Why? Because it influences their motivation in learning the language. How to do it? Watch the video and read these points.

Here are some useful links for you Professional Development. I put here only those websites which I know and which I have tried and now would like to recommend.

The United Kingdom can sometimes be a confusing idea.

If learn the English language and you want to practise it at home, you can visit these websites and continue your studies on your own.

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