Learning to Teach Better

For error correction I tend to use the most frequent type of correction, recast. I believe I use it because it's quick and doesn't harm fluency and communication entirely. But like Penny Ur mentioned, this type of correction all the time may be ineffective and may I add fall on deaf ears most of the times. Research shows that the best correction methods are elicitation, metalinguistic feedback and explicit correction so I feel I need to use more of these methods when correcting my students. Also, sometimes I let errors go by uncorrected mostly because I consider them minor or unimportant errors but there are times when students notice them and correct them. Perhaps it's best the teacher corrects all errors and not the students because it could come across as if the teacher wasn't listening or doesn't care and because learners would rather be corrected by the their teacher than their peers as research shows.

This year I have face to face lessons with a 10 year old girl. I don’t believe I have ever had a student that is so eager to do speaking activities ! She enjoys them immensely! The grammar book we are using has many speaking exercises to practice specific grammatical structures one at a time. We sometimes pretend we are on tv interviewing each other about various things eg daily habits etc, future plans etc.. Great for accuracy and fluency practice. With some imagination and humor added we have a fun time. I’m quite lucky to have such a student!

Whenever the text I’m dealing with permits, I like to use graphic organizers with my classes. From the feedback I’ve gotten from students, they tell me that they help them understand the text better and they are more successful in answering the reading comprehension questions that follow the texts. Graphic organizers can be easily found on the net. Depending on the text you’re dealing with, there graphic organizers such as cause -effect, problem -solution etc. My favourites are the K-W-L (what I know, what I want to learn and what I learned-this was mentioned on Sunday’s session) and the 3-2-1 Strategy. Ss write down 3 things they found out, 2 interesting things and 1 question that they still have. As far as writing is concerned, there are also graphic organizers which mostly help with the organization of their writing, such as persuasion maps, essay maps, story maps etc.

Here’s a recall and share activity I have used with my classes. It’s from one of Penny’s books (Vocabulary Activities, CUP) 1. Write up on the board in a ‘scatter’ about 10-12 words that you want to review. Check they are all understood.Don’t let Ss copy them down. 2. Tell the Ss they have half a minute to ‘photograph’ the words in their minds, that you are going to erase them and they will need to write down as many as they can remember. Tell them how many there are. 3. Delete or hide the words after half a minute and challenge Ss to write them down, each working individually. 4, Then tell them to join up in twos etc and see if they can manage to remember them all. They can help each other get the spelling right. 5. Finally, write up again or re-display the original words. 6. Congratulate all those who got them all. The ones who didn’t should now copy down the ones they missed. Check that everyone understands the meanings of all items. I also get them to write down the L1 translati...

Before doing a listening task with Ss in the classroom I always focus their attention on the topic and elicit any background knowledge they may have on,it. Recently with my intermediate Ss there was a listening in the course book I teach about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. I always play the recording twice, and the first time round I pause straight after the answer for the questions to give Ss some thinking time. I feel it’s helpful, what do the rest of you think? I also try to exploit a listening text as much as I would a reading text by creating a second listening task. Penny mentions them as more in-depth tasks on her slides for this session. For the Zuckerberg listening, I wrote sentences about the text and asked Ss to fill in the gaps with a number. In the following lesson, I put a few of the numbers on the board and asked the Ss if they remembered what each number was about. Another follow-up listening activity is for Ss to take down notes on specific things mentioned in the list...

Hi everyone! I’m Elizabeth and I’m from Greece. I’ve been teaching for twenty years, mostly in private language schools and privately. I teach all ages. This is my third course with Penny Ur and as always I’m really looking forward to it. What I really like about Penny Ur is that she is a very experienced classroom teacher and all her ideas are practical and can be implemented into the classroom without a lot of extra materials-if any. I hope to learn from her experience as well as from all of you and as the course is titled ‘learn to teach better’. See you on Sunday!