Teaching Verbs

picture taken from flashcardsforkids.com

       What we can do to teach verbs to beginners? How they can learn them without getting bord or frustrated? Well there are many techniques that we can use to teach verbs to our students. Remenber that they are learning a new language and you do not want them to get confused.

       A good way to get your students involve in the class, is to group them. There are many ways to divide your class into groups. The simplest and quickest is to group them where they sit, but students tend to sit next to the ones they like, it is beneficial to have them work with other classmates.

       One good activity is to make your students write in strips of paper short answers like: Yes, I do, No, I don’t, Yes, she does, No she doesn’t, etc. until complete all the personal pronouns, then you group the class in pairs, after that, you give each group several strips, and have them work together to write questions for the answers, later, the members of each group can take turns reading their questions and answers aloud. The rest of the class judges wheter the questions are appropriate for their answers, and notice the verb in each sentence.

       This is a good way to teach verbs to new students, give a try, and you would see the results.

      

 

Teaching the Future With Games

    

Picture taken from desktopclass.com

   In order to teach a new topic and to get the student`s attention, sometimes we need to teach English with games. You can teach for example the future tense with a fun game that every student will love, regardless of their ages.

       For me, as an English teacher, grammar class is always an opportunity for fun. We, as teachers, should know that during the first phases of a new unit, the students are trying to grasp a full understanding of the form and meaning of a structure, so there is when we need to get our students relax.

       This game is appropiate for any age and consists in making the students to write on a slip of paper a fortune, it can be silly or serious, but all of them have to be using the future tense eg. “You will win the lottery”. Then collect all the slips and redistribute them in random order. Finally, you tell each student to read his or her slip aloud.

       This activity is very good to practice the four skills (listening, speaking, writing, and reading)

 

Experiences with English Language

I beleive that every day we go to work, it is a new experience, every day happens something different, something that motivate us as teachers, or something that makes you think that you need to change the way you are teaching, or the methodology you are using in your classes.

I have had a lot of experiences when teaching English, some are bad, but most of them are good. One of the good ones is, one time, I went to my school as normaly, I started my class as usually, and then a new student arrived. He said that he came from another school, but he quit that school because he did not liked the way they thaught the subjects, specially English, so everybody welcome him, and we started the class, that day I was Using the TPR method with the other students and we were acting and learning new verbs; I was sitting in my chair, and I started the class by saying to my students stand up, I stood up and every student did the same thing, eventhough they did not understood that new word; then I said walk and I and the students started to do the same thing, I continued with my class acting and saying new verbs for them (walk, stop, run, jump, knock, stand up, sit down, talk,etc.)

All the students understood all the verbs I toll them, and after that I told the students to repeat the verbs, and to give instructions to another student and everything went well, including the new student, and at the end of my class I asked the students if they liked that way of learning, and everybody answer YES, so the new student told me that he was surprised because he learned many verbs in so little time, and without getting bord or stress.

We as teachers need to change the way we are teaching and apply the one that most fit to our students, but take into account many factors, like the motivation of the students, actitude, attitude, and specially the age of them, so remember be tolerant and very patient.

 

Educating Using CLL

picture taken from schoolastic

In this post, I will talk about using CLL in my classes. For me, it has been very helpful to use this kind of method when teaching English. Some students do not want to participate in some activities, that is why it is recomendable to use the CLL method.

First, we, as  teachers, introduce ourselves and greet the students, second, we explain the methodology and the kind of activity we will do, later we make one or two teams of students in a circle, and finally, we start the classs making shure that all students have understood the instructions.

We will start the class by playing a CD recorder about a simple conversation in the target language, and tell your students that they do not need to write nothing, just pay attention to the conversation, after listening to the conversation, we will ask our students if they wish to listen it again, we will play the recording as many times as they want. After this, you tell your students to create a conversation based on the recording, then they have to conjugate verbs, and create new sentences.

The teacher will act as a counselor, will lead the students, and will clear all their doubts and all their mispronunciations. The students will act as collaboratos, being responsables at all times, the need to have the feelin that they are in control of the target language.

When the students are doing the activities, they can talk with the other members of the team, or they can ask the teacher how to pronounce a certain word, or to clear any doubt.

Finally, the teacher, will ask the students how they feel doing this kind of activities, and what have they learned.

This kind of methodology is great to teach begginers, and/or students that are shy, that is why I recomend it, just give it a try,and you will love it forever.

 

 

Fun with English grammar

picture taken from games.softpedia.com

    In my experiences that I had as an English teacher I can tell you that I had taught from little children from 6 years old, teenagers, and adults up to 60 years old, and all of them told me that they like the way a teach because my classes are not boring, that I use games to teach grammar, that I teach in a fun way, and they love learning English with me. W,e as English teachers, need to find the exact method to teach, it all depends of what kind of students we have (kids, teenagers, or adults) so we need to choose the correct methodology to get our students to learn.

From the methods that we have, I like to use the TPR (Total Physical Response) method, which consists on the assumptium that when learning a second language, that language is learnt through a process of codebreaking similar to how we learnt our first language. Students respond to commands that requires physical movement. Teenagers love this way of learning, but be carefull to not over use it because, your class might get out of control, especially if you have rebel teenagers.

The other method that I like  to use is CLT (Communicative Language Teaching) which consists on enphasizing the interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of learning a language.The most common activities in the Communicative Language Teachng are: Example activities, role play, information gap, games, and some others.

 

Teaching English

picture taken from proyects-abroad-la.com

I think that teaching English to any kind of students is a challenge, it is a new whole experience every day, and also you learn from your teaching. as they say, you are a babysitter, you are a doctor, you are a conselor, you are an adviser, you are many more things, but you need to enjoy all this things.
Somebody said that teaching English was easy, that all you have to do is to present your topic and sit down and enjoy the class, I do not think the same way, first we need to like our profesion, second, like I said, we need to enjoy your job and, finally you need to prepare well your class.
I would like to give some advices to those English teachers that do not like what they are doing.
If you feel sick, do not go to work because you might get your cold to your students or they might not understand nothing from a teacher ho has a running nose.
If you found a new rule in the target language, share it with your students.
If you make a mistake or do not know something, do not lie to your students and tell them that for the next class you will found the answer.

This is a good video where you can see how to teach English in a fun way.

Get ideas and put them into practice, and if you have new ideas, share them with all of us.

Sometimes we as teachers need a little help from other teachers, so please share any ideas that you have, or if you found any more videos about learning English in a fun way or having fun with English grammar.

 

Using internet to teach English

If you want to teach your students with out getting bord or impacient, we can give them some homework in the internet. If your students are children and teenagers you can share with them a few web pages where they can do their homework in a fun way.

In the internet you can find many web pages where your students can learn and have fun at the same time. They can find worksheet templates, learning material, games, quizes, and a lot of materials for kids and for young adults.

Some students like to learn English and have fun at the same time, well this is a good web page where you can find a lot of information and games about learning English.

So remember, students learn better if they have fun while learning the language; be patient, be smart, and be a kid again when you teach.

taken from speech.wordpress.com

 

Excel for teachers

lulu.com

Well I think that Excel is a very powerful tool that we can use in our classroom, another way of using Excel is : Identifying similarities and differences by using graphs to demostrate comparisons, also tosumarazing and note taking, students can take notes in excel, they can create outlines of chapter headings and organize them in a spreadsheet, also study guides for certain information can be effectively organize in excel. The students can use excel in the house as homework.

Also as researchers we can use Excel to save information in a very organize way, we can put the date we receive that new information and have a good track about what we are doing.

We can use Excel with in the classroom, with our students like given them simple tasks like additions, subtractions, and multiplications. Also they can have a record on their grades, that way they can see if they are doing well or in which areas they need to improve.

We can teach our students how to create the formulas in order to the students to have a record of their grades specially if the use the green, red and yellow marks; they would have an idea where they need to improve , on reading, writting, listening, speaking, etc.

Lets not forget that Excel has many tools to do many tasks, not only for the teacher, but to the students too, so lets start using it wisely.

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Learn English in a fun way

picture taken from amarello.com.mx

This is a link to learn English in a fun way. Here you can find a lot of things to learn English fast. You can find games, vocabulary, literature games, grammar, antonyms, homophone games, memory games, and a lot of more ways to learn English.

When we are teaching English to any level, we can use technology to help our activities, that is why we need to know about the new technology there is nowaday, like cellphones, laptops, tablets, mobile phones, ipods, netbooks, notebooks, and a lot of more technology that is updating everyday.

There are many ways of using this technology, but for this, you need to learn how to use it first, what are their advantages and their disadvantages of every item. Also the students need to be aware that today almost all the teachers are using technology to improve their classes.

 

EXPERIENCES IN THE B. A.

picture taken from codigosguanajuato.com

Being a student in BA  in TESOL is a real challenge because you have to investigate a lot of new things. Also, as a student, you have the opportunity to learn from your teachers and your classmates aswell, it is a totally new experience that I will never forget.

I am currently studying the Licenciatura en la Enseñanza del Ingles en la Universidad de Guanajuato campus Yuriria, it is a new building which has the capacity for two thousand students.

My expectations on this BA are to become a better teacher, learn better, learn new ways of teaching, get new knowledge on technology, learn better ways of evaluating, get in touch with other teachers, learn new ways to design didactic material, and to be a better person.

Being a student in this B.A. is not easy, some teachers of English had say that we only go to classes fridays and saturdays and we can not learn much with only two days, but reality is different, most of our research is made in our houses, because we have a lot of homework,  investigations, and researches to do, so in order to talk about something, first we need to experience it.