Three ways to help English language learners 'notice' grammar We'am Hamdan, who teaches English at the British Council in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, describes practical ways to build 'noticing' in your next grammar lesson. What is 'noticing' grammar and what is its role in the English classroom? When I was learning English, my teachers spent a lot of time in class focusing on the form of the target language, but with no context. As a consequence, my natural and varied use of English suffered. Later, I experienced ‘natural’ English through movies, music and novels. In his 'noticing' hypothesis, Richard Schmidt says that paying close attention to both the form and meaning of language items will contribute to one's learning. So, how can teachers help learners develop language proficiency using the noticing hypothesis? Help learners notice gaps in their language knowledge 'Noticing the gap’ happens when learners focus on the gaps in their own linguistic knowledge. I checked learners’ general understanding of the text, then I re-read it.
Larry Ferlazzo - Online tools These include The Best Web Tools For English Language Learners (In Other Words, The Ones My Students Regularly Use) and The Best Beginner, Intermediate & Advanced English Language Learner Sites. Now, though, I think it's time to narrow them down to my choices for the "best of the best" or, in other words, an "All-Time Best" list. Here are my choices, and I hope readers will let me know if they agree, disagree, and/or think I've missed some (one key requirement is that they are all free to use). Some of the sites I list could go in multiple categories, but I have placed them in the "domains" I believe they help the most: Obviously, The British Council has tons of great resources. I'm obviously biased, but I think the weekly student interactives I create for The New York Times are very useful to English Language Learners. The Reading and Everyday Life activities from GCF LearnFree are excellent. ESL-Bits has good exercised for Intermediate English Language Learners. Mrs.
How to keep your students motivated Cristina Cabal has been teaching for 26 years. She shares some of her top tips for keeping students motivated. How do you keep students motivated? In my experience, what keeps students motivated is a motivated teacher. So, here are a few effective tips I have collected over the years: Involve your students You will not keep your students motivated if you do not involve them and let them take an active role in your classes. Give students the chance to shine It is also very important to give students the opportunity to be successful. Make learning fun Make your classes memorable. Step away from the textbooks Bring in authentic material that your students can connect with, and that matches their needs and interests. Explain why you are doing things a certain way There is nothing more boring than a teacher telling students to open their book on page 22, and asking them to do exercise five. Give very clear instructions Set clear, attainable goals for every lesson Use different materials Praise
5 Activities to Make Your PowerPoint More Engaging A few days ago on the Teaching English – British Council Facebook page there was a discussion about PowerPoint – Do you love it or hate it? The discussion linked to an article by Rob Lewis who talked about ways PowerPoint could be used in class. In an earlier post he also wrote about the good points and bad points of PowerPoint. I thought that it was an interesting discussion overall and I enjoyed reading other teachers’ opinions. Most people would agree that PowerPoint is just a tool and that the way you use it determines whether it is useful or not. The people who love it, love it because it is easy to use and a convenient way to show pictures in the classroom. The people who hate it, hate it because they have had bad experiences with it in the past where they were subjected to death by PowerPoint in the presentations they watched. This article will look at 5 different activities. My hope is that other teachers will find these activities useful. Contents 1. Download the templates: Top 2. 3.
Larissa's Language Studio: Vocabulary & Grammar Auction: A Revision Game Are you looking for a checking activity before a diagnostic or progress test about grammar and/or vocabulary? If your answer is yes you have just found the right post for you! - What's an auction? It's a public sale of goods or property, where people make higher and higher bids (= offers of money) for each thing, until the thing is sold to the person who will pay most. - What's a Vocabulary&Grammar Auction? It's a fun game which will let teachers understand which topics students have assimilated well and which aspects students need to repeat. 1) Preparation a.Worksheet with about 20 questions about the topics learnt. b. 2) Procedure a. b. c. d. e. f. g. 3) Advantages I think this game has two main advantages for students: 1. 2. If you play this game with your students, please let me know your impressions!
4 tips to help you teach advanced students | RichmondShare Blog | High quality content and interaction in the ELT world I don’t think I have ever taught or observed an advanced lesson that went seriously wrong. I mean cringe-worthy wrong. Which shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, advanced students have been in the game long enough and know enough English to ensure that most of our lessons run – at worst – relatively smoothly. Except perhaps for those all-too-familiar “How do you say X?” However, time and time again, I have walked out of lively, fun, seemingly trouble-free C1 lessons, wondering deep down how much learning had really taken place. Here are some of the things I’ve learned since then: 1. 2. 3. 4. 4a: Use WH-questions illustrating some of the “advanced” lexis you want to zero in on: You: So, Marcos, where do you stand on this? 4b: Use Yes/No questions illustrating some of the “advanced” lexis you want to zero in on: Teacher: Pedro, did it live up to your expectations? Creating this sort of classroom culture, where precision and complexity matter, depends on your ability (and willingness!)
A Simple Notebook System for Classroom Management Posted 03/04/2014 3:40PM | Last Commented 08/02/2017 10:23AM Image Credit: ©Shutterstock.com/Julia Tim Hi All, When I taught middle school, I tried lots of different methods for classroom management, but I found that basic notebooks were ultimately the thing that saved me, in two ways. I have videos on my website that explain both uses, but I'll summarize them here: First, notebooks served as an emergency brake when things got really bad. Later, I ended up developing a much more proactive use for notebooks, one that really helped increased students' intrinsic motivation. Hope this helps someone else!
On the very questionable value of error correction at intermediate level (as commonly practised) We are language teachers for a reason: language learning is important to us; it is one of our primary foci in life, hence we pay attention to corrections, they are salient to us. However, this may not be the case for most of our students. Many of the corrections we feed them, unless we make them very distinctive and they are easy to remember, will be forgotten at a ridiculously high rate (nearly 70% of the information decaying from Long-Term Memory within 9 hours from processing it). What baffles me is how often some teachers seem to forget that grammar correction is a form of instruction. Like instruction it does one or more of the following: it teachesit re-teaches (clarifies, expands, etc.)it consolidates Would you ever be able to do any of the 3 things above effectively through a simple correction or sets of corrections in the margin of an essay? Would you expect most of your students to transfer the corrective information in your feedback to the next essay they write?