3097. Our Students' Real Interests


 
Personal and individual work by students hits the target. Homework is necessary. At home they can revise and review what has been learned at school, in case it is not a flipped classroom, for which you can find info at the tag of “flipped classroom” on the column at the right hand of this blog.
However students might not be able to know how to deal with studying English, which is our common target language. And for us teachers: what to assign as homework, only exercises and translations from English into Spanish, our common mother language?
At home or if they’re teens also maybe at a library they should re-read school texts for instance. Anyway homework should be also communicative, like school lessons themselves. Okay, the students should learn and practice grammar points but also use them for communication sake, into communicative activities, like writing an email they’ll read out at school on the following day, and much better if those students actually write an email to their teacher and about themselves and their interests, and the best ones would be read out in the classroom!
Homework should be twofold: studying and exercises, and not only these latter ones. There’s a part of their homework which could be studying and memorizing a grammar chart, but also they should use that grammar structure into something connected with their own real lives.
When I teach private tuition I give my students examples of sentences that have something to do with their own interests and lives, because the sentences from their textbooks or tablets could have nothing to do with them and so be not meaningful at all: remember our students are learning and acquiring English for real life and for getting a job within not many years because time flies!
Well then, I will say more things about homework on coming posts. / Photo from: Some-Ways-to-Improve-Mountain-Biking Sjfixed org. Students have their own interests obviously, like mountain-biking.

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