being optimistic about situations, interactions, and yourself. People with positive attitudes remain hopeful and see the best even in difficult situations.
Role play and discussion activities in teaching speaking skills. (scenarios, dialogue).
This study is aimed at portraying teacher’s strategies in teaching speaking to students at secondary level and recognizing students’ response towards the strategies by involving an English teacher and a class of 22 students. In collecting the data, classroom observation and interview were conducted to identify the strategies of teaching speaking, and questionnaire was administered to the students to gain the data about their response towards the strategies under the umbrella of descriptive research. The result revealed that the strategies used by the teacher were cooperative activities, role-play, creative tasks, and drilling. In the meantime, students’ response towards the strategies resulted in positive attitude as they responded that the strategies helped them to speak, as well as concerned oral production of students whose participation was emphasize.
The teaching of speaking is having high concern in many language programs and teaching strategies cannot be denied as a factor influencing the teaching outcome. Strategies employed to achieve the ability to write and speak would be different because the goals of each skill are not the same. The former is concerned with the ability to produce written language, whereas the latter mainly focuses on producing oral language. Moreover, the strategies for teaching the English skills should be made appropriate for each skill in order to attain the expected outcomes.
Principles behind the teaching of listening. (motivation, authentic language, listening strategies)
Listening is an active and interactional process in which a listener receives speech sounds and tries to attach meaning to the spoken words. The listener attempts to understand the intended message of the oral text so that he/she can respond effectively to oral communication. Why teach listening?
Students hear different accents and varieties.
Listening helps students to acquire language subconsciously.
Listening is a receptive skill. o Education.
Mass communication.
What a difficult task.
Teaching listening skills is one of the most difficult tasks for any ESL teacher.
Sometimes students feel frustrated because they find listening difficult.
Theorists realized that listening is not a passive but an active process of constructing meaning from a stream of sounds
Listeners actively attempt to grasp the facts and feelings in what they hear by attending to:
what the speaker says; how the speaker says it; the context.
What are the ways of improving learner’s pronunciation? (phoneme, phonetics, speech sounds).
Many people who discovering how to learn English as a second language come up against a very frustrating problem! They study hard to be able to speak with correct grammar, accurate vocabulary and relevant expressions.
If your English pronunciation isn’t good, then your level of fluency will be consistently underestimated. A strong accent can be a great barrier to making connections. Research even shows that employers in the US often favor candidates who speak with standard versions of British and American accents for more prestigious roles. One thing is for sure: working on your pronunciation skills is definitely worth the effort. Read on for eight effective strategies to help you sound like a local, and a few expert tips from our friend, the YouTube teaching star, Bob the Canadian. Here’s a quick overview: How to improve pronunciation
Focus on phonemes
Search YouTube for tips from fellow learners
Try some tongue twisters
Learn new words with their pronunciations
Read aloud and record yourself
Listen to some podcasts
Speak slowly
Spend more time talking to native speakers
What types of thinking skills do you know? What do they involve? (connections, decisions, organizing information).
Thinking - thinking refers to the process of creating a structured series of connective transactions between items of perceived information (my own definition).
Metacognition - metacognition refers to awareness and control of one's thinking, including commitment, attitudes and attention.
Critical thinking - critical thinking refers to reasonable, reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do. Critical thinkers try to be aware of their own biases, to be objective and logical.
Creative thinking - refers to the ability to form new combinations of ideas to fulfill a need, or to get original or otherwise appropriate results by the criteria of the domain in question. Often thought of as "thinking outside the box." Observing: an information-gathering skill that involves obtaining information through one or more senses.
Decision making: selecting from among alternatives.
Patterns of classroom interaction. (language skills, student involvement, cooperation, group work, pair work, individual work, mingling)
Classroom interaction, classroom behavior describes the form and content of behavior or social interaction in the classroom. In particular, research on gender, class, and 'race' in education has examined the relationship between teacher and students in the classroom. Types of classroom interactions
Taking the different main participants in classroom interactions, namely students and teachers, one can think of the following possible patterns: Teacher-students. Students-teacher. Students-students. The Student Interaction within the classroom leads to efficient teaching in numerous ways. By allowing students to interact they begin to trust one another and build bonds with one another, that sometimes leads to forever long friendships.
Teachers who have positive interaction with their students create classroom environments more helpful to learning and meet students' developmental, emotional and educational needs.
The benefits of using visual aids in the ESL classroom. (posters, presentations, photos, pictures).
What are the benefits of visual aids?
5 reasons to use visual aids for speeches and presentations
Presentation visuals grab an audience's attention—and keep it. ...
Presentation visuals make complex ideas easier to understand. ...
Presentation visuals build emotional bridges with the audience. ...
Presentation visuals help audiences retain information.
Visual aids help teachers establish, explain, connect, and associate ideas and concepts to make the process of learning more interesting, enjoyable, and effective. Some of the benefits visual aids provide for teaching and learning include: Helping inspire students to study more effectively.
Visual aids, when integrated into the lesson plan through media, attract students´ attention to the topic presented in the class, enhance and facilitate comprehension of grammar and language, increase students' motivation, as well as help students to memorize the new vocabulary and structures.
Presentations with visual aids can be 43% more persuasive than those without them. According to research from the Management Information Systems Research Center, visual aids make a message more persuasive.
Visual aids are those instructional devices which are used in the classroom to encourage learning and make it easier and motivating. The material like models, charts, film strip, projectors, radio, television, maps etc. called instructional aids.
I use student presentations with nearly all my groups who are B1 or above. Sometimes I structure the presentations quite loosely, and don’t require a minimum number of slides or minutes. At the beginning of a course, I pass round a list and ask students to choose a song each. We then listen to these songs, with a song worksheet, over the course of the term / year. Where possible I ask students to create the song worksheets themselves.
I regularly note down new words from my lessons on ‘word bag cards’, and students write definitions and example sentences for these word bag cards. Once the word bag is sufficiently large, there are a number of different activities that can be done with them. Students can choose 8 – 10 words, and make up a story. Pronunciation activities are a great way to change the focus of a class. The pronunciation of individual sounds, word stress, or sentence stress requires different skills from the learners than reflecting on grammar or the meaning of words.
A good lesson plan should include the following 5 components; lesson topic, class objectives, procedure, time management, and student practice. The class objective is the most important thing in the lesson plan. The objectives should be the focus of each lesson. It is what does the teacher wants the students to be able to do by the end of the lesson. The procedure is the step-by-step guide for the lesson. It should show the progress of the lesson. This means it tells what should be taught first and what should be taught second accordingly till the last activity of the lesson. Practices are mainly used to check if students understood the topic, and help students memorize what they have learned during the class.
A lesson plan is the instructor’s road map of what students need to learn and how it will be done effectively during the class time. Then, you can design appropriate learning activities and develop strategies to obtain feedback on student learning. Steps to building your lesson plan.
Identify the objectives. ...
Determine the needs of your students. ...
Plan your resources and materials. ...
Engage your students. ...
Instruct and present information. ...
Allow time for student practice. ...
Ending the lesson. ... Evaluate the lesson.
Frequency of MT (mother tongue) use in EFL classroom. (acquisition process, giving instructions, teaching grammar).
Mother tongue develops a child's personal, social and cultural identity. Using mother tongue helps a child develop their critical thinking and literacy skills. Research shows that children learning in mother tongue adopt a better understanding of the curriculum.
Mother tongue is defined as the first language that a person learns and the language used in that person's home country. An example of mother tongue is English for someone born in America.
Students who have strong first language skills are able to acquire the second language more easily due to language transfer. ... The mother tongue could be used as support for the second language acquisition process, which makes the learning process easier for students and teachers.
What is PPP teaching method? (presentation, practice, production, context, accuracy, fluency).
It is a lesson structure a way to order activities in your lessons.
PPP is Presentation Practice Production
Presentation is where the language is an introduced or presented to learners.
Practice stage – it is a stage when students use the language in a controlled way. (doing activities to consolidated the new topic).
Production stage – it is where the language is used by learners in a more open way, it includes speaking activities.
Creating a motivating and empathetic classroom atmosphere. (self-confidence, tolerating learners’ errors, individual differences).
The teacher is to act as students’ friend. The self-introduction including all his/her means of contact, his/her intimate greetings, amiable face and gentle voice can dissolve the students’ incredulity, indifference and worry. Teachers can use humor to shorten the distance between them and their students. Teachers can also create humorous moments through their body language and eye contact at proper times. Some students can create humor in interactions in class. In one class there is always one or two students who make the right kind of joke favored by the peer students about their college life. If the teacher doesn’t make full use of them, it will be a waste of “human
resources”. The teacher should make the class interactive to elicit humor from such students in case his/her own humor is exhausted. Studies show that “motivation is of crucial importance in the classroom” (Tricia Hedge). Students are influenced by a variety of motivations which affect their attitude
toward English learning. Some students learn English to communicate with English speaking people.
Overcoming the challenges faced in a mixed ability classroom. (learning skills, motivation, teaching strategies).
There is hardly any language classroom where the teacher did not face the problem of mixed ability learners. Language classroom always consists learners of mixed ability even though the learners are in the same level. Different factors such as motivation, learning skill, learning ability, aptitude, background, etc. vary from one individual to other and as a result, the gap among the same level’s learners even broadens from elementary level to intermediate level and from intermediate to advanced level. The issue of mixed ability learners is prevalent in both small and large classrooms but it is much more severe and far more difficult to handle in a large classroom. It is a great challenge for the teacher to ensure effective learning in a mixed ability classroom. The syllabus and classroom activities have to be designed in such a way that it is neither too demanding for the weak learners nor unchallenging for the more competent learners.
Mixed - Ability Classroom. Before dealing with the challenges and effective strategies of a mixed ability classroom, one must have a very clear concept of it. According to Cambridge Dictionaries Online (2008), Mixed- Ability classroom can be defined as a class “involving students of different levels of ability”. Richards and Schmidt (2010) have further elaborated the term as “a class containing learners of different ability levels as reflected in differences in Language Aptitude, motivation and learning styles.” According to them, most classes contain learners of mixed abilities but when the difference becomes greater, it may “affect classroom dynamics and classroom management. «ire son & Hallam (2001) suggest teachers need to recognize that a class is “mixed ability” because children have different strengths and weaknesses and develop at different rates. Language classrooms consist a large variety of students of different levels and according to Penny Ur (1996), mixed ability language classes are “classes of learners among whom there are marked differences in level of performances in the foreign language.”
Presentation procedures. (planning, objectives, data and facts, conclusion).
Presentations are a great way to have students practice all language systems areas (vocabulary, grammar, discourse and phonology) and skills (speaking, reading, writing and listening). They also build confidence, and presenting is a skill that most people will need in the world of work. I find that students who are good presenters are better communicators all round, since they are able to structure and express their ideas clearly.
Presentation skills are extremely useful both in and outside the classroom. After completing a project, a presentation is a channel for students to share with others what they have learned. It is also a chance to challenge and expand on their understanding of the topic by having others ask questions. And in the world of work, a confident presenter is able to inform and persuade colleagues effectively.
Presentations can also form a natural part of task based learning. By focusing on a particular language point or skill, the presentation is a very practical way to revise and extend book, pair and group work. The audience can also be set a task, for example, a set of questions to answer on the presentation, which is a way of getting students to listen to each other.
What is task-based learning? (task-based method, task-based activities).
Task based learning is an approach to language learning where learner is given more interactive task to complete. It includes several stage:
1.Pre-task. The teacher intrudes topic shortly.
2.Task. It is a main stage of the lesson structure students’ complete activity in a groups or pears.
3.Planing. Students plan a short report about task.
4.Report. Students express or introduce their reports.