Experiences of a teacher of English

  Today I would like to point out a couple of points that may help you out, mainly if you are a teacher, like I am.  You know, a lot has been said about the student’s motivation in class, and that’s fine, for our lessons don’t need to bore our dear students and a whole herd of cows alike.  However, if for example a kid in class achieves to solve a math problem, or to write an essay in English (say, his target language), about a given topic, well, he will get perfectly content. There may be nothing better than the student would strive to do things fine, and learn a lot of things from his teacher.  Effort and struggling may also be paramount in class, and alike at home with their homework. I mean, the school and the classroom are not theme parks, as Gregorio Luri says.  Second thing today. I’d also like to pinpoint the use of books, paper ones. Miguel Ángel Martínez-González stands up for the use of paper books instead of a lot of screens. On this blog I’ve said s...

  A lot of us people want to learn a language – I teach English and keep learning it! – and we have to practice all four language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing.  For me and many of us listening may be the most difficult skill to acquire, but with practice you do improve a lot, believe me.  Anyway, today I would like to tell you especially about reading. Reading books, articles, websites. And also believe me, it’s a great skill to practice.  Stephen Krashen stated that by reading books you can learn a great deal of a second or foreign language, and I can assure you it’s thus. I have no big problems to read any text in English: fiction, non-fiction … except Joseph Conrad’s books perhaps, for they show to be extremely difficult for me to understand – even I had an Irish friend, Connor by name, who told me also that for him it was tough to understand, and he said that he read like one page per day, of his books. It’s curious, Conrad was Polish by birt...

  Just to halt at times. And have a quick mental look or perspective to your teaching. That is something I sometimes do.  For example I did something of this at Christmas break. We had stopped our English classes for a while. And at home I had a mental peek at how my students were doing, and how I was doing as a teacher myself. Just to detect failures in me and in them. Also to find out what was turning out fine.  And all that is just something simple, even intuitive. It’s like keeping track of how things are going. And all that does not necessarily mean you as a teacher must do something else, apart all your workload, which may be almost huge.  If you stop to think of it, it may be something we teachers may inadvertently do when lesson-planning – even more, it is something we actually do when lesson-planning!  But I mean here to carry it out in a bit more aware way, and like something special at some breaks – Christmas, the Holy Week at southern Spain, and fina...

  I’ve been perceiving a curious fact on Granada streets lately, well, from a few years now. It’s parents with their children, walking or cycling anyway, and they’re Spanish definitely, yet they speak to those kids in English, and these ones sometimes respond in the same language.  I guess Spain is not kind of an isolated country anymore – it used to be one like that after our civil war, in the 1930s and afterward, and now it’s pretty simpler to find young people talking in English on the streets, for example a Spaniard to a foreign person.  And stays abroad now are much easier and more common than forty years ago, so as to speak.  A lot of young parents try their kids would learn English as a matter of fact.  However, today I’d like to point out something I do myself to learn English. On other previous posts I wrote that one way to increase my lexis and subsequently to learn English is what follows, just in case it may help someone.  I read a lot, or quite...