3630. One Step toward Really Helpful Lessons for Our Students

 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 lesson, we can think of a few goals or aims which meet the students’ chief needs – say, two or three or four objectives, ok? 

And then we plan the activities that meet those objectives, better if we interweave the four language skills in class: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Or three of them in a class, or a couple of them at least. Anyway, combining the four language skills in a single class is not that difficult. 

If your students can see you pursue that main goal of getting them into language communicators in English, they will more likely respect you as a teacher. 

So let us plan our lessons with our students in mind. 

I said that contents should be included in class, and we can get them from really interesting textbooks or/and from the best literature books in human history, namely the classics: you can learn a language by reading and enjoying books. 

Alike, include contemporary literature because they contain street language: the real English people use, and you can attain that by including graded readers. Have a nice day.