Learning to Teach Better

You can check the common usage of words using Google Ngram and trace its history since the 1800s until 2008. I hope they continue it to count the last 10 years, as I am sure there have been some significant declines and increases. My students often say "persons", so I have used this as an example. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=persons&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cpersons%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=persons&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share&direct_url=t1;,persons;,c0

Hi Penny and everyone, week 4 live session was also full of useful insights and interesting tips, I learned a lot! Reading aloud Most of my students like this activity. In some of my classes, most of the students are really enthusiastic when it comes to reading aloud, they would ask me if they could read the text for the class no matter whether it’s a new text or one that they had already been familiar with. And I always thought that reading aloud was more student-centered. So, whenever we had a reading lesson, I always asked students to take turns reading the text for the class. After Penny’s 4th session I came to realize that it doesn’t always work that way (student-centered). Asking students to read aloud a new text (doing sight-reading) may not be very helpful as they may make mistakes in pronunciation, intonation, etc, and therefore they may not be able to understand the passage very well and at the same time they may also make it difficult for others who listen to have a good gr...

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!

Last week, I approached a grammatical exercise following Penny’s advice about giving the students all the answers and then I asked them if there was something unclear. For me, it was a new technique and the students were surprised because in our teaching culture, we are not used to do so

Since we are talking about L1 I would like to share my experince with you. I am a Greek teacher of English and when I used to teach grammar in my lessons, my students found very hard to undestand the causative form since it does not exist in their L1. So, in order to assist them understand the phenomenon I used examples of L1 otherwise almost no one could use the form. Thus, I believe that L1 in some cases in necessary.

Another website I have encouraged my students to use for writing practice is Write and Improve by Cambridge English. They choose a topic to write about - beginners, intermediate, advanced or Just for Fun, write their text then get instant feedback for how to improve it before submitting a final copy. There is also a section for IELTS. https://writeandimprove.com https://writeandimprove.com

For those of you teaching young learners and teens and you'd like to give your students some authentic writing and reading practice, we have used this digital pen pal website before. You can choose a course for your class to join then it matches them with other students from around the world who are similar in age and interests and can be as young as 8 and as old as 18. They then interact by responding to each other's comments and questions on the course. There is a great range of topics such as Fake News, Protecting the Planet, Robotics, Festivals and Cultures lasting from 1 to 6 weeks. One of our classes signed up to a course about Pakistan to tie in with Malala Yusafzai's book which they were going reading afterwards. https://www.penpalschools.com https://www.penpalschools.com