3040. Enjoying their Textbooks?


 
In Spain at least many students don’t know how to study English and its correspondent school subject, and therefore they also fail at learning and acquiring that language.
They don’t know what to do with their textbook and activity book, for training for a test for instance. It is a school subject so different from History, Biology, Chemistry, Literature, etc. Therefore too there’s a big failure at getting good grades: those students get bad grades definitely.
There was a case in which a student one day thought of carefully re-reading the texts from the textbook at home, trying to understand the gist of the story plus each sentence within that story… and he did improve his grades, over time!
No one had ever told him how to treat those texts, which on the other hand were interesting – a story about some specific characters, and funny besides.
Those students who do not know how to study, moreover, have to face up with tests they do not know how to answer: they weren’t trained for that at all!
Something we English-language teachers can do is to devote a couple of classes to explain how they can face up with their books, plus with some challenging sense of humor too. Otherwise as well the teacher can ask a student that gets good grades and is a high-achiever to explain what learning strategies he follows.
Summing up: the students should have fun by studying their textbooks and find out that it is practical for them to learn English, because they can participate more frequently at lessons! / Photo from: carcel antigua y leda That place is close to the one where I was born and close to the time when I was born too, in 1969 in Badajoz, south-west of Spain.

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