Experiences of a teacher of English

  One example of a lesson plan for the second or foreign language classroom? Ok, let’s go with it, for a lesson plan or part of it, by combining the four language skills, which are listening, speaking, reading, and writing.  Let me see. Ok, we have a text, one for our dear students, adequate to their English level – that language is the target one.  First I provoke my students’ attention by asking them, kind of, Now, do you know how we say such and such things in English? And I give them, one by one, sentences in Spanish for them to try hard to translate into L2 – English.  Then, I hand out some photocopies of the text or I send it via the Internet, to their laptops or iPads.  Then, they have some minutes, say, ten or fifteen, to read the text silently. While they’re doing so I can contemplate how they work – often it’s awesome, and I can circulate to solve doubts.  Then I read the text out for them to grasp word and sentence pronunciation.  Then, the...

  Are you a foreign or second language teacher? If affirmative, let’s think of some points that may help you, both if you are a novice teacher or an experienced one. With experts’ help, of course, and what they put into teaching debates.  We language teachers ought to have the main goal for lessons as mastering that language, so we can foster activities which foster communication in that language, yet bearing in mind that those activities should have interesting contents, respectful toward our students’ ways of being and what their parents wish for them.  Now I want to focus on those language activities.  They should promote communication in the target language, thus we create an atmosphere in class where that tongue is the communication vehicle.  That said, like a web is created in class where the normal thing is communicating in, say, English – which is the tongue I teach.  Something essential is planning each and every lesson. And thus when planning a le...