3624. How to Treat Our Students and How to Teach the First Lessons

 So we may be starting a new school year. And thus the first and the second lessons are so important. 

Let’s suppose we teach a second or foreign language. On the first and second classes I think we teachers have to set high standards. 

Ok, and may we speak to our students in their mother tongue? Because we are giving them paramount information! 

I’m personally talking to them first in Spanish, their and our mother language, then the same in English. Chunk by chunk, a piece of info after another piece, combining both tongues. 

And over time I will – I hope – speak in the target language, some 90% of the class language, or even more. I am to use their mother tongue because also I have to help them get acquainted with a sound and good but complicate course-book. 

Oh, you know, something quite important I have to bear in mind is that along the school year I have to have the main goal as to provide communication in class: a second language teacher must not confine him or herself to give and teach language facts, but communication in the target language must be the main goal. 

And to provide that communication in the classroom I must create an English-speaking atmosphere, so I will imitate a native speaker – almost any teacher can imitate a native speaker at a high standard I believe. 

High standards have to be set from the two first lessons, remember. Yet at a level our actual students can reach! 

And this counts for any subject you teach, not only languages. 

If we want to get good students and good persons, we have to treat them as that good: otherwise if we treat our students as poor ones…, well, you know, we will get little from them. If you want to get a good person, you have to treat him or her as such. Have a nice day.

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