Experiences of a teacher of English

  Maybe often we have to train candidates for B2 or C1 levels of a foreign language. Those levels are upper-intermediate and advanced respectively. How can we sure we’re doing well? We can imagine we ourselves have to pass those levels and we’ll know what to do! And we’ll have clear ideas that we have to practice listening, speaking, reading and writing, plus grammar and vocabulary. What would we do to train those language skills plus grammar and vocabulary in order to pass an exam? And so we will be able to train our candidates for those levels. Thus when planning our lessons we could think: What have I to do to improve for example at speaking or at listening? And we’ll go for it in a practical way. For me listening and speaking are the most demanding and difficult skills to improve. As well we can think about what we did when we had to pass B2, C1 or C2. This latter level is the highest one in a language, and when we get a thorough C2 level, that means we are biling...

  Our students should be educated in both freedom and responsibility. There are few rules. Also there’s a schedule or timetable. They’re treated as persons, with freedom and responsibility. In that way they can grow without stridencies. In that way they can learn and study just because they want to, helped by their teachers. Why a schedule or timetable and a few rules? For their happiness, ultimately: we want they should grow up in an atmosphere of calm and fortitude. If there’s a problem we will correct that kid aside; in other words we’ll try he should realize about what’s wrong. With freedom and responsibility they can learn, work and study in a nice and pleasant way: they wish to learn. All of them feel at home, and the school is a prolongation of home and their families: those parents entrust their kids to us teachers: they don’t delegate their thorough education in our hands but we help those parents and families educate their offspring. Students love their li...

  Reading texts in the target language is a nice and suitable activity, which one we have to exploit a lot: reading makes you learn that target language. And better if those texts are meaningful to our students. They must be meaningful and interesting to them. But also providing texts that seem not to be interesting for our students can be a challenge to those people… The condition is that those texts may be interesting per se, in themselves, and might increase our students’ culture, because, as I said, they’re interesting per se, in themselves. And we teachers must help our students increase their culture. Those texts deserve an extra effort from our students, and we’ll have to lead in those scripts, by making some lead-in activities, like eliciting vocabulary or ideas about those texts that are new to our students. That extra effort may mean some challenge by the students. We teachers might explain positive points about those scripts, so the students may get attract...

  I rarely write about environmental friendship, and it’s quite important. Well I’ve written something before. And we have to achieve our young students would gain some respect and a nice attitude toward our beautiful planet. We’re educating future citizens, even present citizens! When we take our students to an excursion we teachers have to set an example and teach those kids to litter garbage into garbage containers. As well we can teach our students to admire a beautiful landscape. By educating our students in beauty we’re helping them become more human and more honorable. And we’ll see this improvement even at classroom behavior. For sure. We can also teach them how to recycle plastic, glass, paper, oil, etc. I remember quite many years ago we had an English reader-book about recycling, in English, which is the school subject I teach. It was pretty interesting, and we had nice discussions about recycling. This subject matter can be an interdisciplinary nature to...

  We second or foreign language teachers have to speak massively to our students, okay. And sometimes we’ve got to make an oral presentation about some issue, okay. Something that boosts, enhances, and fosters massive speaking is… massive reading. Also for our students, before an oral exam in that target language, it could be useful to read massively too. Also for improving the speaking skill massive reading creates the soil where you can grow the plant of the language. And reading what? It depends on the subject or issue you’ve got to speak about, but on the Internet you have lots of texts for learning English or any other common foreign language. As well our students and we teachers have textbooks, novels, articles, news, etc. So remember, before an oral exam or an oral presentation read rather massively: the more you read the better. Why does reading help speaking? Because you think in the target language and also because it provides you with language “weapons”: vo...

  Self-motivation is adequate for learning. Of course! Some geniuses, like Edison, Einstein and Steve Jobs weren’t motivated and good at regular learning at school. Otherwise they were motivated for the knowledge areas they showed they were so good... Also we teachers have to be careful and prone to discover the areas or skills our students are good at. And what can we do to help our students become motivated about the school subject we teach? Maybe we can make them work at the area or subject we teach and eventually they’ll become motivated, when they see they’re progressing. If our students are not motivated, we have to gently praise the small achievements they make, and little by little they will become motivated and happy at our school subject, math, science, English as a second or foreign language, religion, sports, grammar, history… I had a student, at private tuition, who was poor at that school subject (English), and over time, by praising his achievements, he...

  If you’re a head teacher or have other teachers under you and you know there’s a mess and misbehavior continually at another teacher’s classroom, you shouldn’t interrupt and butt in his lesson so as to pacify the students. Why? Because he will for sure lose authority. We may think we’re doing well and helping that teacher with problems but ultimately we’re making him lose his authority. We as head or experienced teachers should help that teacher with problems but in a different way. It may be more difficult to teach a teacher to exert his authority than learning oneself to have that authority. So let’s talk with him and pass on our experience to him. And let’s remember that that teacher may be suffering from that misbehavior. Ultimately that teacher has to learn by himself how to exert his authority, because it is something you learn on your own. As a friend of mine, another teacher said, the first year of your career as a teacher you suffer a lot, the second year...

  Oh our teens and adolescents! We have to be patient with them, also because we have gone through that important period too! And they’re in our hands. We have people who are traveling through a period of their lives that is crucial for their education and formation! We grown-ups can influence a lot on their lives and biographies. On their lives now and in the future too. We must love them and wish the best to them. What we do and what we don’t do influence on them a lot and that’s for sure. It is something to be expected that they do peculiar and even rather odd things and they may have a behavior which is not predictable. They’re even strange to themselves and can’t understand themselves! But also let’s remember that that age is one of high ideals and high compromises. They have thirst for the genuine and authentic. Because of that they sometimes dress and behave the way they do. Remember we have to try and understand them, and be patient. They’re great anyway! / Ph...

Although I'm posting further, in short, today I wanted to thank you all of you readers, because unless you read this blog it would not be possible. It's great you all are there, all the time, expecting and awaiting for my posting. I also thank the other teachers that post on TeacherLingo for sharing their ideas and all. You're great!

  Self-discipline. That is just necessary. It is not enough we think we can manage the classroom. It is necessary for the students to have and develop self-discipline. Yes, because only in that way they’ll set to work and learn. And self-discipline can be taught to those students. How? Well, explaining to them the advantages and necessity of working and trying to learn, this is, making them think! And we’ll implement this with the advertising psychology: repeating the same message both with similar words and in different modes also, and often with a challenging smile. Self-discipline is paramount: it’s the students the ones who have to wish to learn. When we achieve our students would wish to learn, the road is open to us. Alike we’ll reinforce our students’ discipline by telling them what they’re doing fine and making them recognize and rationalize what’s wrong about their behavior and attitude. Self-discipline: it is necessary to make our students grow and increas...

  Interiorizing reading so as for it to stay inside somehow, in our interior side I mean. I wrote that sentence yesterday. And it serves the purpose for many things. I mean, reading carefully is a nice learning strategy but also it is good for many other things. Interiorizing what is being read is useful for example to our students. Also to externalize the genius they carry in their inside! For them to write essays, to write stories, to write books, it is necessary and sort of customary to read massively. It’d be silly to spoil possible geniuses we might have among our students, wouldn’t it be? Teachers as well have to read, if they want to improve as teachers and as persons, maybe as dads and as moms. And the summer break can be nice and adequate for reading. Now I focus on the teachers’ case. We should read about education and about teaching, though there may be a long sequence of years since we started our career as teachers. Formation and training does not finish ...

  I know an English-language teacher that got C2 level of that language, which as you may know is the top level of a language. And with stays that were few and short in English-speaking countries. What was his secret? His attitude. Yes, just his attitude. He was eager to learn and acquire the language. He learned his English in Spain, while speaking in that tongue with American people – above all, also with British people but less. He practiced the four skills of the language: listening, speaking, reading and writing, in that order of importance. He listened to radio stations on the Internet, spoke with native people, read a lot in books and had a blog where he posted in English. And he was a new-word hunter: every or close to every word he saw he made a nice effort to learn it and through that he learned a vast lexis. Regularly he still reads, every single day and writes his daily post on the Web. Some people say sometimes you can’t see the foreign learner when reading...