Experiences of a teacher of English

We teachers have to work fine and to teach our students to work fine too.  For example their notebooks, books and iPads have to be clean and neat. Discipline at working neatly is very educative, indeed.  As well we will teach them to think, to ponder, to meditate, to reason. And most of the topics and issues we teach are suitable for making our students think about them.  Even when talking to them we can leave blanks in our speech in order to make them think: silence can help think a lot – it pushes you to think and reason.  Most of our students are used to playing videogames too much maybe: let's also help them think about abstract topics, even more when they already are 10 years. When they’re 10 years, for instance they can understand syntactic and grammar concepts, when teaching a second or foreign language.  Before that age approximately we have to use visual aids for teaching a language: flashcards, posters, realia or real objects, ...

  You all have seen that my methodology for teaching and learning English is communicative. Okay then, one activity which is very appropriate for naturalistic communication in the classroom is for the students – and for the teacher too! – to describe pictures. I bring to the classroom, in my bag, usually a magazine with many varied pictures, National Geographic namely. It has pictures of landscapes, people, animals in the wild and nature… My students particularly like this activity, which I try not to repeat too much, on the other hand. Usually one of my students has got to describe a picture that I chose for him while his classmates cannot see it. After the description the magazine runs through the classroom, for the rest of the students to see the described photo. Except for the describer the other students have been imagining and making out the picture, and often the reality is better than their imaginations. I’ve got to recognize that those guys of National Geogr...

  Phew! I’m back at the blog. Here you are. I was thinking of writing something about the care toward our planet we should educate our students at. Something I used to do when we ran an excursion was to throw all the garbage and litter to garbage containers. Thus our students plastically learned how to take care of our environment. Sometimes I explained to them that for example plastic couldn’t get destroyed easily if they threw plastic disposable bags to the ground – not to mention drink cans... Even sometimes we were able to see squirrels, something that got our students more immersed in nature. We used to go to the town outskirt forests and countryside. As I said on a previous post, running school excursions was great and generally all of us came back to school joyful, after a day in close contact with nature, our surrounding nature. We teachers must educate our students in taking care of the environment and even beyond that point: all the world! / Photo from: fish...

I f you’re a children teacher plus a foreign or second language teacher I would tell you something indispensable to utilize at the classroom is realia. Real things or realia. When I taught young children in Jaén (south of Spain, a nice town), some twenty years ago I was recommended to use them, otherwise my students would not have understood me in English, our common target language. I was told by kind and great Mary Jane Amaya to use real objects and stuff as a vehicle for my students to understand me and learn English. Young children cannot think of abstract things, so they need to see realia or real things. I can recall that I brought and should have brought to the classroom: ingredients of food packs, some basic foods, a salad ingredients (great Lucas Huijtbregts even used to make and cook a salad with his young students and in the end they ate up the salad they had made; sorry Lucas if I misspelled your last name), stationary material, fruits, posters (visual aids), etc. ...

Yesterday I taught two private classes to two brothers. One is 10 and the other one 12.  Well, you know, I treated them as adults, in some way: I listened to them attentively, to the answers to my questions. I treated them with love of benevolence.  And the thing I think turned out well, and I noticed they’re maturing and improving at their school subject of English!  They told me they also would pray for me too, among other interesting things. Sometimes I paraphrased what they told me. I try to teach them with affection. Like grown-ups I treated them: they’re young but not silly.  Even I let the younger brother tell me about a videogame, although obviously it hadn’t nothing to do with his school – it’s something that concerns him anyway, it’s something important for him. When I was making up a sentence to any of them I used realia (some coins to use the verb “add” for instance) and meaningful sentences, for them to realize English has to do wi...

Young kids learn by playing, among other paths.  On post # 259 I gave you a version of a list of more than 100 games.  What they do in the class helps them learn.  One example is TPR ( Total Physical Response ), as you may know. They play the actions, verbs, jobs and professions you tell them in English to carry out.  They live those activities.  In early ages they can somehow connect reality with words. Thus they use their brains and make them develop. Also you can show them shapes – triangles, squares, circles, rectangles, made out of colorful cards or on the PC, and the next day you can ask them what rectangles they saw the previous day, in English, by showing them the shapes at the same time.  You can ask them what object a triangle was, too.  Just try a few days, so as to find out if it works with your kids.  If they respond in their mother language, you could teach them how we call those objects in Engl...

Teacher A said to teacher B, “Young students, of 8 years for example, need images to learn language.  They can be flash-cards, posters, pieces of paper, real things ( realia ).  And with your older students, 15 years for example, utilize the illustrations of the course books to help them think visually as well. Many activities have attached pictures, and they aren’t only for decoration. They are helps to solve the activities.  We often connect an idea with an image, in daily life. So also in the school.” / Photo from: skiing. www thrillofilia com

One day teacher B said to teacher A, “It’s clear English should be used as a vehicle language in other school subjects.  Moreover, students should be educated in observing and appreciating beauty – in English – in other subjects. It’s sound to educate students for example in fine arts, in English too.  However, you can surround students with beautiful things, but those things have to be in connection with their lives. This could be done by means of discussing about paintings for instance, in the classroom. Let them give their opinions in the classes you have with them. Do start you yourself: say something, say a prompt, break the ice.  If our students acquire sensitivity, we are educating people with human values, like tradition, creativity, inventiveness, imagination!, solving problems, resourcefulness…” / Photo from: people tribe net. venus by milo in louvre    

One day English teacher A said to English teacher B, “Do you remember how important was to have visual aids when you were teaching at the former school? Visual aids can be very useful, yes sir. Even necessary sometimes. The English language enters children’s minds also through images and visual stuff. Now I can remember some examples you utilized, albeit some of them were time-consuming anyway. Think of role-plays (the restaurant thing...), think of revising past actions or last weekend things when you wanted to revise past simple as a warmer to the English class. Or when you assigned them as homework to cut off the pieces of food packages with the ingredients in different languages, or you might also think of the set of flash-cards, word-cards, or the poster of the parts of a house that colleague of yours lent you. Well, you had just the very chalkboard, where you used to draw so many things, and they liked the puppets, etc. Or as well the description of th...

One day teacher of English A said to teacher of English B, “Realia (real objects) for learning English? Pretty useful, I’d tell you. Try and use them sometimes. Now I remember two cases of my own. Last year, one day of February, one of my young students - 9 years – had to learn the word ‘swing’, ok? I was trying to explain to him the idea of something swinging. Soon, it happened I remembered the golf swing! Ok, I taught him how to swing, with an imaginary club. As well I brought something relaxing in the class. Kids that age simply need to move around and do actions. These latter ones make them learn words and phrases. We repeated the swing. I’ve got to say he learned swinging pretty well, in my opinion; he’s so smart a kid. He enjoyed the class and ‘swinging’ got stuck in mind. Amusing. Something else in short. One of those days I was teaching a class with adults, some sixty-something years. There happened to be a chess board and its pieces in the library where we used to have the cla...

One day teacher of English B said to teacher of English A, “I naturally use miming in the classroom, with both adult students and youngsters. Also I use varied kinds of gestures, acting out too, smiling or making faces, all within a discreet way (I try so; acting out, I think, should take into account different cultures). Eye-contact is essential: I sweep the class by looking in their faces. In this way I’ve noticed that the atmosphere in the class helps make the learners more focused and the class itself more human, or the like. One example to make them understand me – I’m referring now to my older students, from fifty-something up to seventy or like that – is: I address all of them with my hand and then I tap on my ear, saying ‘Listen, just listen, listen... to me’ , then I tap on my chest, a few times. Now, realia, look. In the classroom where I was teaching a few years ago – actually it was the library of the center – there was a suitcase, in a corner. The students: ...

One day teacher of English B said to teacher of English A, “Using newspapers in the class of English may be very useful, believe me. This activity is for advanced level students, because they have to face with authentic and genuine language. Realia bring them to real, authentic English. You can tell them to buy a specific paper at a newstand. However, I think this is not realistic in practice: just some of them or most won’t buy them, from my experience. So something you can do is buying a copy, and photocopy a piece of news as many times as students you have. Please show clearly the name of the newspaper you all are going to work on. Another way is to go to the computer room and read the online version, or in their laptops or tablets, etc., if possible... For me the core point is to actually read the news, its headlines and the body, and understand the contents. Remember to utilize news that really concerns them or something they know about. Many activities can be implemented: preread...

One day teacher of English A said to teacher of English B, “Young students, six, seven, eight... years cannot follow a class just sitting and listening. They need to move, to stand up, to walk, to circulate around. I knew a teacher burnt out when he began teaching English to young students. So, I would say - if it’s useful - you might shift activities every five, or ten minutes. Utilize visual aids, implement TPR (Total Physical Response), take them down to the playground to learn objects and places of the school, make them learn their five senses, use flash-cards, posters, word-cards to stick on the board, utilize realia. However, start teaching them to stay sitting nice also. Be patient. Female teachers have, I’d say, something inherent for these kids, yet there are some male teachers, evidently. Unless you have much extra time to make up material... Well you should have some stuff at the department of English, and you can ellaborate some more and keep it. On the label of this blog, ...

One day teacher of English B said to teacher of Englsh A, “Immersion, yes. Let’s make our students relate, mentally link any of us with English, in the halls and offices of the school alike. Albeit both them and us are the same nationality, in our case, Spanish, this way of conducting may be useful. Try this conducting at the school, even when leaving the school after a regular day, and walking down the stairs, toward the school bus. Try this, Alonso, and let me know next week, right?” Photo from: underwater_mailbox coolthingsinrandomplaces com

One day teacher of English B said to teacher of English A, “Your students can learn a lot by carrying out project-works and making up posters, about one topic they’ve chosen. They work in pairs. In the class you can make a brainstorm of ideas from them, for possible projects, related to their likes and interests. So they´ll suggest topics, with your help. Next, they make some simple research, on the Internet, in English: sport, current news, science, a film, skiing and resorts in Sierra Nevada (Granada), our natural environment, hurling international league, history of Britain, customs and dresses, cuisine, 3D cinema, dinosaurs, the house of the future. They can write a summary of an interesting text found on the Internet. And the last step is pasting their summaries – very brief ones! – and some pictures on a card poster, to be hung on the walls of the classroom; for example, you might select four posters.” / Photo from: dezeen com. A project by Norman Foster.

One day teacher of English B said to teacher of English A, “Teaching, learning, communicating, as you know, must be something linked to our surroundings. I’d tell you something to help you link the contents of your classes to their actual lives. These are my findings. Utilize realia up to the age of 9: real food, real cutlery, to simulate having a meal at a restaurant, in a simple role-play, etc. Do not utilize visual aids any longer when they have reached 14, for they may sense they’re being treated like children. The students can understand and manage abstract concepts like the subject and the verb when they are 11. Well, I’d stop here, you know. I hope this can be useful. The ages I talked about are not iron limits, and those ages were referred to boys. A teacher that teaches girls also can figure out similar ideas, no problem, I guess. Oh, yes, I know you have not much extra time to plan your classes nevertheless...” / Photo from: Arizona Cooking book www arizonagift com

One day teacher of English B said to teacher of English A, "Using realia can somehow immerse our students into kind of small environment where English is used naturally. Assign one day as homework to bring packages, round cartons, etc., to the school-room, with the names of the ingredients of foods, in English. It's authentic English. If the students are adolescents, they can just write the ingredients on their notebooks. Besides you all in the class can read instructions, like Keep in the original packaging, well closed in a cool dry place . One activity: all of you work on the ingredients of different boxes or foods. You are writing the ingredients on the board. O, this game takes next to no extra-class preparation. Afterward, you ask the kids what ingredients they think are in a chocolate. Bringing real packages provides a special mode of dealing with authentic English, colorful objects, everyday food and drinks, smells." / Photo from quedificiles wordpress com

You can find what follows to be very useful. Composed by Georgina Hudson, and published on the site of British-Council BBC. Within the teacher forum of this web site/ Picture from www the-laser com speaking skills Submitted on 13 July, 2010 - 02:22 I go along with Mr Díez in every point he made. He has been so clear that there isn't a lot of room to add more comments. I had the most enriching experience teaching a Franco-African boy some years ago. We couldn't resort to L1 just because I had no knowledge of Senegalese or French and my young learner didn't have any knowkedge of Spanish, my mother tongue. It's absolutely possible to carry out your class in English a 100% of the time. For the most part from my experience with that boy, I had to resort to realia, story telling, songs, miming, role-playing etc. to convey meaning. My expectations were very realistic from the very beginning. We drilled lots of classroom language to ease the learning-teaching experience (look ...

This is a comment I’ve just written, for British Council – BBC site, to answer a teacher who wants to receive ideas to teach the speaking skill. / Photo from learningsupport co uk (The comment has not been published yet: the staff is moderating whether being outlet on the site). Hello Maria Victoria, small9 and vlnraojagatha, You know what? This morning I wrote a comment to try to help you, Maria Victoria. But, at sudden, right after having composed the comment, I clicked on I don't know where, with my mouse, and puuuf!!, everything disappeared. Now I'm going to write the things I can remember. First, what I've just said above, well, is... funny. Let's put the anecdote aside. You ought to, or you can speak in English, I'd tell you, from the very beginning until the very end of the class. Although your students may have close to no knowledge of English. It's like a treat between you and them. They soon will make up the image that you only speak in...