Learning to Teach Better

Chants for grammar lessons are great! It helps learners to memorise rules especially the pronouns. If your L1 is like mine which we don’t have gender-specific pronoun, it’s challenging for learners to memorise pronouns what else to put them into use. I have always wanted to do chants. I even have my lyrics ready but the problem with me is that I am a bit tone-deaf. I have different rhythm in my head yet when I say it out loud, it turns out to be a total disaster. Can anyone suggest me a simple yet interesting way to chant for a tone-deaf?

The idea that learners do not like to be corrected by peers should be given more attention as it is often overlooked by teachers. Talking from my personal experience, when I was a student, I refused to participate in any whole class discussions or even share my opinions during group works in English lessons. The reason was because of my classmates who kept on correcting me. Honestly, I felt threatened ... and stupid. Unlike most of my classmates, both my parents weren’t well-educated thus English is an alien language at home. I learn English solely by reading hence my poor pronunciations and grammar. So when my classmates kept on correcting me, I was demotivated. Fast forward few years later, I went abroad and mixed with people of different nationalities. They have never corrected me and this helps me gain my confidence to use English. How did I improve? When I’ve gained my confidence to use English, I become aware with how the language is used and also its pronunciation. Hence it’s tr...

And I want to thank Phil from Malaysia who had shared a number of helpful websites during this session!

I love that Penny brought up about the use of L1. People here believe that using L1 in lessons is a taboo and those who are found using L1 could be simply labelled as incompetent. It is true after all that using L1 can also be a waste of time especially when it is incomprehensible. People suggest the use of simple English in second language classrooms to make input comprehensible yet often teachers are unsure of the level of simple English people are talking about. A brief explanation from Penny on the use of L1 has made me feel more confident with my teaching. Thank you Penny!

Principle 2 is the best principle of all 3. In Malaysia, we are working on CEFR thus teachers are asked to go on to many courses. There is a course on materials adaptation. We are suggested to give different tasks to students of different levels. This then raises the issue of time. Teachers do not have time. It is interesting when Penny suggests a list of techniques for questioning. It really helps. It makes differentiation be very easy to be done in lessons!