Learning to Teach Better

A 2017 news quiz for back to school! http://leoxicon.blogspot.com/2017/12/news-quiz-2017.html

For anyone fascinated by languages! I'm currently reading his book, The Etymologicon and it's brilliant. http://blog.inkyfool.com/

Slide p 59/64 Social media and literature have really played a significant role in my classes. I have also used both in tests. Please take a look at ex 3 below.

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.

I would like to comment on reading out loud and on guessing from the context tips. For the first one I would like to suggest my method. At first, me, the teacher read the text aloud so that students grasp the pronunciation. Then, I give time to students to read it silently in order to understand it and asnwer the clarification questions. In the end, I ask students to read it again aloud, play roles or change their voices in order to practice pronunciation too. This technique concerns younger students. As far as the guessing from the text is concerned, it is very amusing to let the students' imagination come in surface.

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...