Experiences of a teacher of English

  We as teachers wish our students would learn a lot, who doesn’t wish so?  It seems sound and sensible they would gain reading comprehension. At least here in Spain quite some or many students have rather poor reading understanding at school and when they leave school.  And experts now state that some drawback for them is they may be so accustomed to screens. Even they may show some addiction to them. Well, it’s ok they use computers and tablets at school, yet it seems more important they’d use paper books and practice handwriting: sometimes you can encounter kids or teens or college students that have no dexterity at composing an essay, or understanding an article properly.  And that’s a big problem.  It is so necessary our students would dedicate a lot of their daily time to study their paper books and write essays. What can you do with a student who reaches college and cannot answer an exam with some appropriate response?  It is paramount our students s...

  The good teacher must know how to plan his or her lessons. They have learned over the years. Now I’m referring to second or foreign language teachers. They learn how to plan efficient lessons for their dear students to learn effectively.  And there’s a plus. They achieve to plan in rather short time.  That kind of teacher plans his classes with their actual students in mind. He wants for them to really learn and acquire that target language.  He knows how to get the most from a class text or a photocopy he has gotten from his resources – they may be modest, though.  He learns how to be imaginative and he’ll accomplish – as I said – to get the most from a photocopy.  And he plans several activities from that sheet of paper. For example, as follows.  First he plans a listening comprehension activity while his students do not have the copy yet. And he has planned a lead-in activity for that listening, for example, a first exercise of predicting what the...

  The pandemic has brought us something good, well, more than one good thing. It is that since I had to teach online last school year, I also started to send emails to my students. This current school year we have returned to face-to-face lessons… and I keep sending emails to my grownup students, and it works!  For they feel their lessons and all the English course more of their own, and I can tell you that my students work and learn better. Well their lessons are just that, THEIR lessons. And they participate a great deal on those classes.  On those frequent emails I also push them upward at their feelings that they are actually learning English. I’ve written things like, You are being great at the lessons . You know, this is positive motivation. As well I let them know that I like to work with them.  Alike I attain to reinforce things I tell them on the classes themselves, by sending them those emails.  Something else for today. I think that we language teache...

They should not!  I’m a teacher, you know, and I understand that we teachers have to foster, trigger and boost our students’ creativity. We have to.  Education is getting the best from our students, isn’t it?  We teachers cannot confine our stupendous labor to have our students carry out some automatic exercises after we have presented some topic, and when those kids finish those exercises, okay, now, let’s pack up and go home!  Our students have a great potential of creativity, most of the cases, even nearly all of them.  But education also is leading our students’ potential of creativity. Yes, because they may be young persons, and do need and want and expect we their teachers should guide and lead them toward maturity and happiness. Respecting their liberty. They may have a potential of creativity, but we have to channel that potentially huge creativity. They may be inventive but they are in need of our advice and guidance toward a hap...

Learning and acquiring a foreign language, like English in my case and my students’, demands learning and acquiring a vast vocabulary. This is clear enough, right?  Something I implement when daily learning and acquiring English is reading books in that language. I consciously try and learn new words from those readings. Every single day.  And when writing for example these blog posts some words come up to mind and then I use them, while writing. For example ways of saying things in English, or single words, or phrases. Or whatever.  I am sure also I gain and acquire words I’m not aware I’m acquiring. Also those words may come up when writing. More often when I read more.  Currently I’m reading a book about teaching English by great Jeremy Harmer plus a book on Apollo missions to the moon in the sixties and early seventies, when I was born and a young infant. Great.  Sometimes I read as if I were writing those texts, word by word, and in tha...

Although our students may be using their iPads, we teachers should also teach them to write manually.  If their notebooks are neat, that will for sure help them greatly to study, work, and learn. When a kid or an adult writes nice, clear and neat, they have clear ideas in their minds. Or likely so. They, in a word, have mental hygiene. Or likely so.  Thus we could, with their permission or their parents’, or with both, have a look at their notebooks. Firstly we'll have told them we're going to pick their notebooks. We’ll learn a lot from that written work about our dear students.  If they utilize books also, we could teach them how to underline important terms or ideas – not too much underlining, because at first they hardly recognize what is important or they think all is important: their minds are maturing. But with some practice with the whole class we can efficiently teach them what the main points are.  And that in the classroom with the who...

  Exam and test contents should not be a surprise for our students, something unexpected. Exams and tests should assess and evaluate our students’ knowledge and practical competences. I’m focusing on English as a foreign language, but what I’m saying could be useful for other school subjects. Okay then, our exams and tests should, above all, assess our students’ communicative competences. Grammar and vocab are means, tools, instruments for communication. And their contents (of exams and tests) and their kinds of exercises should be very similar, even equal to the ones we will have done in classes. When teaching kids I used to include vocabulary activities, grammar exercises, writing an essay or composition, all biased to rather showing the communicative competences my students had or should have accomplished. Those tests assessed reading and writing skills, sometimes also listening, while I assessed speaking along the year, both with short answers or topics my student...

I was going to write about the social media in the classroom, do you remember? And I’ve remembered an anecdote or story of my mid-90s of last century. Emailing was starting. And we in our school thought of communicating with students over the Atlantic, with students from the US. Said and done. All regarding emailing was starting, as I said, and so another teacher, one expert at computing, assisted me in this nice enterprise. Now emailing is so basic, but then communicating with overseas was all a historic fact. So first I had to take all my class to the computing classroom, where my students composed their texts on the computers, both in English – for them to practice English, our common target language – and in Spanish, for the American students to learn and acquire that language. Summing up, my colleague compiled all the texts and sent them to the concerted American school in a single email. You know, my students were expecting their emails, from the US! I took their ...

  We teachers should create a nice atmosphere in the classroom where our students can work, learn and grow without stridencies. In that intellectual atmosphere our students will focus and concentrate on their learning and working. They need silence and quietness. We can achieve that ambiance if we talk to them in a rather low voice. I’ve seen it: when you talk to your students in a rather low volume, they tend to get quieter, so as to listen to and understand you. We teachers can try to make up all that nice ambiance in the classroom. For example when we want them to write a composition, a comp. That atmosphere will allow for thinking. We have to make our students think, which will allow for their neurons to connect with one another, if those students are children or young children, and if they’re teens they will make up their own personalities – also if they’re younger they will make up their personalities, of course! For writing a composition they need to be prompte...

  Quisiera hacer una breve reseña del libro de Jean Guitton (1901-1999) El trabajo intelectual . Es un libro que te hace redescubrir lo sensacional que es y que puede ser el trabajo intelectual. Va dirigido a estudiantes, pero también puede ser muy útil a los que todavía somos estudiantes, y siempre lo seremos, y a los que escribimos. Para que aprendamos. Va pegado al suelo pero también te hace volar sobre un trabajo intelectual fructífero y enriquecedor, para la propia persona, y posiblemente quizá para los que entran en contacto con ella, personalmente o a través de sus escritos. Genial, como el propio autor. / Photo from: flying-7 combiboilersleeds com

  ¿Pueden ustedes creer que me cuesta un poco desarrollar un texto en español o castellano? Estoy acostumbrado a escribir en inglés, desarrollando artículos. O quizá sea simplemente que tengo que pensar; bueno, eso pasa también en inglés. El español o castellano, como prefieran, creo que es la tercera lengua más hablada en nuestro querido mundo. Primero el chino, después el inglés – qué suerte tienen ustedes de saber inglés porque sea su lengua nativa… – y en tercer lugar el castellano o español. ¿Alguno de ustedes tiene otros datos? Porque el árabe es también muy hablado, y el ruso también. Pueden opinar, por supuesto. Ah, y qué suerte tengo de saber español. Pero iba hoy a escribir sobre el arte de la docencia, o de enseñar, o de ayudar a otros a aprender. Sí, yo lo considero un arte, y una vocación, en definitiva. Me alegra enseñar, o dar clases, como decimos, incluso cuando tengo que dar clase a niños o adolescentes, incluso cuando tengo que dar clases de ingl...

  A great idea may be to have a school magazine. And it is so motivating for the students to collaborate with contributions in the languages they’re learning, for instance English, French and German. And you teacher can correct very few errors or mistakes, so as to publish articles they actually composed. All this is very motivating, because the students obviously like to have their articles or contributions published. The students could send you their articles, just-for-fun jokes, curiosities, insights, science articles, sports like the school soccer league, pastimes, etc. Some of the school parents can contribute to the expenses of the issuing by means of their corporation ads. I’ve carried out this activity with other teachers in my previous school and I can assure you it’s a grand thing. Even we could use the magazine for class activities, starting with just reading and saying the errors and mistakes they can see out loud. Over time they, the students, become mo...

A valuable attitude from us teachers of English and other languages is to extract and foster our students’ creativity.  When I was teaching in Jaén, south of Spain, on tests I used to include a composition or essay, for example with such or such beginnings, that is, with an imaginative prompt I tried.  While grading and marking and correcting the exams it was a relief to encounter a brilliant and fantastic writing, brilliant up to some extent. The kids’ imagination usually was powerful.  Something else they needed was the grammar and vocabulary. / Photo from: old-castle-wallpaper traveleza tk

The main goal in my opinion about teaching a language and helping learning and acquiring it should be communication, passing on messages.  One version of writing at schools is practicing for learning some grammar point.  However students should get and accomplish a communication aim, and beside it they will learn and acquire English or another different language and its grammar and vocabulary. / Photo from:  writer www studentarchiverement org

How to make a commentary on a given text?  Some students who have the set work of commenting on a text tell you nobody has taught them.  I would say the first thing is twofold: understanding and enjoying the text.  Make them read the text several times, and you may let them ask you whatever question.  After having read the text they will understand more and more, also with the words they asked you about.  This is the first step. Briefly the rest of the commentary should be about how the writer has made the text for us to understand it; how enjoying it; literary figures, like metaphors; what is special in that text; in few words, all you teacher can tell them: style, etc., whatever you teacher may make to build up a commentary about the text. / Photo from: www dailyteachingtools com

We teachers of English and other languages ought to run and embark on kind of a campaign to teach our students three basic things:  writing on their textbooks and activity books with a crayon or pencil (which can be erased and corrected),  writing neat and with a clean handwriting,  and not scribbling on the book margins.  They seem little things, and they are, but also they’re so educative.  Besides the same books could be passed on to their younger siblings or other poor students.  Of course the thing changes with tablets, but I would hold up what I just said. / Photo from: letter_writing www salon com

It’s sound to learn how to write notes while the teacher is speaking.  Sometimes we will write the key points,  sometimes most of what he’s saying,  sometimes a global diagram with the important points,  sometimes just words, or references to other sources,  sometimes the point or points we’re concerned about,  sometimes we will just listen and maybe we’ll write afterward. / Photo from: diving www obgtravel com. This picture is just a nice illustration

Yesterday a colleague of ours told me that his students don’t know how to compose an essay of history: they are used to tweeting, but cannot compose an extended and long answer to a history test.  This post is nothing against that social network.  They write short sentences but can’t write a composition.  What is the solution? Maybe to teach them to write compositions, making up threads of thought and using Spanish linkers. / Photo from: classroom synonym com

Some teacher or expert at teaching says that tablets aren’t good for our students, for they don’t write with handwriting.  Others say calculators shouldn’t be used: better use paper and your mind. With calculators you wouldn’t think.  I’m in favor of using tablets and handwriting and calculators: there’s an "in between" both, or changing from time to time.  Something useful, which teacher Angela says (see TeacherLingo by clicking on the link at the right hand of my blog) is that we can use warmers to shift into English after another school subject has been taught.  For example: writing a dictation, making questions, talking to them, relaxing techniques, asking them by using the grammar pattern we’re learning, etc. Some of the previous warm-up’s are of mine too. / Photo from: esquí en Sierra Nevada - Granada - Spain. We're waiting for you to come here!

A useful and helpful activity with kids can be composing a story with given characters and each character has this feature or that different one.  This activity is better after the reading class or set time for reading, because you proposed an abridged book that kids liked a lot.  Now you have their minds open to fantasy. / Photo from: ClassroomShot mondopub com