Experiences of a teacher of English

  Learning a language is beautiful. Learning English is so too.  For learning English, which is my case and my dear students’ as well, tentatively you ought to be relaxed.  Well, some sane tension may be okay, for you struggle gently to learn that tongue and put all your strength into action to learn it.  There should be nice rapport between the teacher and his or her students, and in that way these latter ones will learn with some satisfaction.  Alike the students, the learners ought to be aware of the ways they learn, English for example. They are not just exposed to teaching, but they are eager to learn English. They do not attend lessons in a passive way, yet they are so active to learn English. In that way they do achieve to learn it.  They reflect on what they are doing both in the classroom and out of there on their own. They reflect, think of, ponder, meditate about the ways they learn, and tend to better what is susceptible to better and improve....

  Many, many of us want and need to learn English or any other language. This blog is on teaching English.  Now I can tell you how I do to learn that adorable language. I do some activities like listening to a radio station – one from Dublin – plus carry out activities from an English C1 coursebook – for example I carry on speaking exercises as if I were speaking to some other students, by developing some internal discourse – plus other activities plus… reading!  I try to read two books in English, and the thing works. I assume that most of what I have learned has been by reading.  Reading is not the only activity you need to do to learn a tongue, but you have to practice the four language skills. Anyway, reading may be the one that may give you the language for speaking and writing.  Reading gives you grammar, lexis and ways of saying things in the target language.  As I told you, I’m reading two books, one about teaching English, by Jeremy Harmer, plus a ...

  In this new school year we teachers would like our students would work well, would learn a lot, and would study fine too.  And since they are younger than us and we are in charge of teaching them, we have to teach them how to work that fine.  And they thus will learn how to have neat and useful class notes, and they will acquire and develop some like for the work carried out well and outfitted well.  For that goal tutoring sessions are crucial. At those times and in the classroom we may monitor their work: how to write down neat and useful notes, how to keep them in an orderly manner, how to record each day’s date at the beginning of each day’s notes, how to follow and study those notes, how to enhance those notes by consulting other books and websites.  If they utilize laptops or iPads for taking notes, same way we will teach them how to type those class notes.  For work well done is so educative.  And when they sit for studying those notes plus tha...

  A new school year is beginning, and we teachers wish our dear students would learn a lot, don’t we? As you know I teach English to adults. And I want for my students to learn how to taste reading books. For reading is a language-learning booster indeed.  They will have to get graded readers, or full version books in some of the students’ cases. I can affirm for sure that by reading you learn English. Not only reading, of course. Yet reading gives you vocab and grammar and ways of saying things in English, and at the same time you enjoy even can relish learning that language.  You have to read many readers or full versions to grasp the language, yet each page read is a firm step forward.  As well my students will also have to read from websites whose link I will provide to them. Formerly I handed them out worksheets, but last school year with the online lessons I had them work on pages from websites, for example from the British Council – those guys are aces at teac...