Oral Work

Oral work is one of the most important skills that students should have but we can find some limitations, speaking is perhaps the most demanding skill for the teacher to teach, in their own language children are able to express emotions, communicative intentions and reactions, but in English there are limitations because of the lack of actual language, for example: teachers don´t know what students want to say. If you want your pupils to continue thinking about English, simply as means of communication, then you cannot expect to be able to predict what language the children will use.

Also teachers need to find the balance of the way like students speak. What important with beginners finding the balance between providing language trough controlled and guided activities and at the same time letting them enjoy natural talk.

At the moment when the students commit mistakes, teachers should be attentive. When the pupils are working with controlled and guided activities, we want them to produce correct language. If they make mistakes at this stage they should be corrected at once.

When children start learning English, they are presenting new language orally, students obviously need to be give language before, they can produce it themselves. Language has to go in before it can come out. Teachers hare for think in the pupils know what they can do.

One of the most successful way of presenting language to young children is through puppets or a class mascot. Having “someone” familiar constantly on hand whom you can have conversations about anything and everything. Another strategy is that teacher can use very simple drawings on the board, and at the moment when students have to speak drawing can help them to get ideas. Silhouettes can be use on the overhead projector; they can be movement if you attach a piece of wire to them. Other suggestions can be that teachers can use simple and clear pictures to presents new language you can act situations, controlled practice goes hand in hand with presentation since it is important that pupils try out new language as soon as they have heard it. In controlled practice there is a very little chance that pupils can make a mistake, with guided practice follows on directly from practice and will often be done in pair or in small groups, guide practiced usually gives the pupils some sort of choice of language is limited.

Writing

Writing

Writing in English is not easy because the pronunciation and the way in which we have to write the words are totally different. For example, the pronunciation of the word "audio" is /ˈɑː.di.oʊ/. A Spanish speaker can write "oreo" as the cookie instead of the correct spelling; this is just one example of many we can say. If your students can write in their own language, they can learn faster to write in a foreign language (if they don't have the same alphabet in both languages, it can be more difficult to learn the new one). In the classroom, we focus our attention in writing because it is the most difficult skills that students develop. The teacher has to teach a little of grammar and spelling; spelling is very difficult even for teenagers, so young learners will have to repeat each word as much as they can to memorize the way in which they have to be written.

Errors have to be gently correct because young children tend to cry easily, and we don't want to deal with that problem. If our students made a mistake, we would just tell them that it is not well written and give them the correct way to write it. Young children will learn easily if we say the things in a good form. They just need to be understood every moment, and we should make them feel comfortable with us their teachers. Reading will help students to know the "rules" of writing that's why is very important that they first learn to read and then to write correctly. We use many controlled practices with children who are starting to learn a new language; we just write on the whiteboard or show some illustrations about the topic we are teaching, and our students have to write the name of the objects or the illustrations that they see, but free practices are important too. Free practices help students to be more confident with their skills. They have a better performance in free practices because they can make mistakes without feeling bad.

Students who are beginning to learn a new language should read out loud while they are written because they need to create a relation between what they are writing and what they are saying. In that way, learning to write well is more easy for them. At the beginning, students probably can't understand why they are writing, but they are having their first experience with their writing. They are just copying what they see or what the teacher says, but with a little bit of time they'll start to understand the words they see, and they won't just write things without sense for them. Matching is a very good option to relate words and illustrations; we can do many matching practices with every topic that we have to teach. For example, if we are teaching numbers, we can search a practice with de numbers and their names in English, and students can match each number with their name. These are practices to improve our writing because we are seeing how to write well the word that we are learning.

Copying can be the tool to introduce writing to our children. As I said before children can just copy what the teacher says, but copying is just the first step to start developing their writing. We don't have to say that copying is a bad tool just because students don't know what they are writing; be sure that they'll learn in the process. An activity that we can do with our children is to write a short sentence in the whiteboard and give them some seconds to see it then we have to erase the sentence from the whiteboard, and students have to try to write it. They can commit a mistake the first time, but they just need time to memorize well the word, and with their knowledge about vocabulary they will copy the sentences without mistakes.

Fill-in exercises are very useful, but we as teacher have to create these fill-in exercises with words that the already know. We can't give them a mini paragraph with words they haven't never seen because they won't do anything. They can also be frustrated because they don't know anything about the teacher is talking, and they can start to lose the attention in the class. The activities mentioned above are controlled, buy students need to explore their writing in a freeway. They need to write what they are thinking, what they are felling, and what they are experimenting to be interested all the time because if they are just writing things without sense for them, they'll stop to practice. We have to remember that they vocabulary is limited, so the will need some help to express their feelings, but they need to write alone as much as they can.

Students can create dialogues to interact with their students. Of course, this can be very difficult for them, but we as teachers can give them short dialogues, and they can write them on their notebooks to practice their writing and then their speaking. The last that we need to know is that we have to encourage our students to start practicing their writing with all the activities that I mentioned because they need to develop a confidence with themselves when they are writing, but we don't have to insist on doing it. Students have to write when they want. That activity has to give pleasure for the students; they don't have to see it as an obligation. If they see writing as an obligation to pass the subjects or to make our teacher happy, we really fail in our labor of teaching the new language to our students. Please, we have to love teaching to make our students love every skill that they will acquire with us.

Topic- Based Work

Topic-based work

What does topic-based mean?

If someone tell you that your textbook is topic-based, they want to tell you that the information in the book is about one subject or topic. Other textbooks for children are story-based or activity-based, but the topic-based ones are more useful because students focus their attention in just one topic, and it is easier to start thinking about experiences about that topic. Students can be more motivated or more interested in a topic that they know, and in which they can talk about their life's stories. If students are just listening stories that are not related with their lives or just fill-in sentences without sense for them, they will lose the attention to the class. Working in just one topic help to improve student's memory because they start to associate the words they are learning with the topic. When they don't remember a word or the meaning of a word, they can think about the topic, and probably they will remember the meaning.

If you are worried about the time that you have to spend teaching just one subject, let me tell you that it depends on the interest the students show, the amount of vocabulary you want to teach, and the material you have. The material is very important to work with young learners because we cannot just start to talk about one topic; we have to call their attention with illustrations and real objects. We as teachers have the obligation of find the best way to work with our students, and that they feel comfortable talking about the topic we are teaching. Topic-based work is related with all the skills we develop because we need to write, to listen, to read, and to speak about each topic we study in the classroom. As in everything we teach, we need controlled and free practices obviously related with each topic.

In an introductory course, we can teach topics in which our students are interested, but if they have English as a principal subject, we can't. We need to teach topics that the institution chooses, which they consider more important for children. At the begging, we can teach topics like the colors, the greeting, the numbers, etc. These will be interesting topics for our learners if we present it to them in a creative way. If the school leave you to teach the topics that you want, you can choose it based on the other subjects. For example, in Natural Sciences they can study the animals, you can teach the same topic in English to be easier the work of memorize the names. Another example can be to teach the numbers (from 1 to 10 because they cannot acquire too much information) If they are learning the same topic in Mathematics.

We have to teach a specific number of topics through the year, but as I said before the time we need depends on the interest our children show. If they are not interested in what we are teach, we'll need more time to achieve our students memorize that topic. When they are really excited with a subject, they tend to learn easily, so we have to try to develop each topic in a dorm that result interesting to our students. As soon as you choose the topic, you should make the material to teach it; remember do it with many colors and illustrations that call the attention of your pupils. You are working with young learners, so you can't present them a simple chart without illustrations or something that results interesting. If you say "this topic is so basic, so I can teach it rapidly" you are wrong because young learners need patience to success in the labor of learning something.

Before choosing the topic and doing the material, you should think about which skill you need to work more. If our students are less enthusiastic when they are writing, you should work more with written activities. You have to create in their minds the idea that writing is funny because you can express whatever you want or maybe because while you are writing something, you create an illustration related with the topic you are working on. Topic-based work allows us to have a world of possibilities to teach any topic; we famous our attention just in one subject about which we can create paragraph, sentences, or even we can share our own experiences related with the topic.

To finish this topic, we can say that topic-based work is better than story-based and activity-based work because we are just dealing with one subject. Learning the vocabulary and other things about it will be easier. Students won't have to learn many information which sometimes is unnecessary because we have to focus our attention in a specific topic. All the activities have to be related to not lose our students' attention at any moment; they need to think about each topic as the most excited that they have studied. Remember, first you have to choose the topic, then you have to create the material and evaluate if the students are interested or not to evaluate how much time do you need to teach it, and the last point of topic-based work is to teach each class with energy and enthusiasm to our children develop an interest in each topic despite at the beginning that say that it is a boring one.

Planning Your Work

PLANNING YOUR WORK

Planning is a very fundamental tool for teachers. To be able to plan well is one of the key skills that teachers should have because it involves imagination, creativity, organization, responsibility, and passion for teaching. I think that planning your work allows you to imagine what is going to happen in the classroom since when teachers plan their work, they know how the time will be distributed in each activity, and how the lesson will fit in the class.

There are a number of benefits to writing a lesson plan. First, lesson planning produces more unified lessons. It gives teachers the opportunity to think deliberately about their choice of lesson objectives, the types of activities that will meet these objectives, the sequence of the activities, the materials needed, how long each activity might take, and how students should be grouped

For teachers the most difficult part of planning their work is to look for different methods that fit with each student’s capacity of learning because there can be methods that can fit with some student’s abilities, but there can be others that don’t. besides that, i consider that the lesson planning process allows teachers to evaluate their own knowledge with regards to the content to be taught

Also, we must mention why planning the work is important:

I think that most teachers plan lessons in order to feel more confident in the class.  If we know what we are trying to achieve in the lesson, we are freed up to spend more time with the learners rather than worrying about our next step. Planning is also important to map out learning activities in a coherent and logical way, in order to help students, understand, learn and practice concepts and skills which will develop their abilities in English.  

When planning the teacher’s work is important that every teacher sits down and think about the necessities of every student, and how they are going to cover every single necessity. One important thing to have in mind when planning a lesson is that teachers want to provide variety for their students because, as soon as they become bored, they have lost the crucial attention that students need to learn.

A very good way to vary making a lesson plan is to provide information that can be interesting for the students, but how can teachers do this?

Well, the newest threads are always interesting for the students. For example, the music can be a big help to beef up student’s learning. The good part of using threads is that they can be interpreted in different ways, but essentially they are activities & routines that students are familiar with, and which they will have no trouble picking up again.

As I mentioned in the brief explanation above, there are some aspects to consider when making a lesson plan and in the picture we can see which they are:

To create a lesson plan could be difficult for all the teachers because it takes a lot of time to think about all the activities that will be performed during the class, but also, it helps teacher to look more relaxed and confident at the moment to teach. According to some students from the major of licenciatura en el idioma ingles opción enseñanza, who had passed through this experience of teaching, planning their work to go to teach was not easy, but it was their biggest tool when teaching their students.  A teacher without that big tool is similar to a soldier without his weapon, so now, we can understand why planning our work as teachers is necessary to achieve all the objectives that we think about when we plan our classes.

 Lesson planning is at the heart of being an effective teacher. It is a creative process that allows us to synthesize our understanding of second language acquisition and language teaching pedagogy with our knowledge of our learners. Sometimes, teachers forget a very important part of planning their work ,and it is to motivate their students by telling them how good they are, or giving them pieces of advice to improve.

In conclusion, think of a time you entered a class with a hastily written lesson plan or no plan at all?

·         How was that experience?

       •   How did you feel?

       •   How would the lesson have been improved with more thorough

Those questions are for you to think about and reconsider if you are doing a good job as a teacher. If the answers of those questions are not as good as you expected is because you are not making a correct use of your lesson plan, or you are not planning your work correctly.

The Tools of the Trade

THE TOOLS OF THE TRADE

First of all, let’s define what tools of the trade means.

The tools of the trade or the tools of your trade are the skills and equipment that you need to do your job. It means all the things that will be useful to develop a class.

It is important to take into consideration all the tools that will make you be a good teacher since those things will help you to define if you are doing a good job or not.

We can also include the Words creativity and imagination in this part because they are two very important elements for teaching.

It is necessary to explain why the words creativity and imagination are included in the tools of the trade as i mentioned in the paragraph above.

The answer for that is that creativity and imagination go together with the ability that a teacher owns at the moment to develop a class, but also, the physical world is the main means of conveying meaning to Young learners. A long list of aids is necessary in the classroom to convey a meaning in some way.

If a teacher wants to convey a very clear message to his/her students, to make use of different kind of objects will be the best way to do it. If you make a full use of things and objects as well as the language, you will have good results as a teacher because in that way, you can get the student’s attention, and the process of learning will be easier for them.

As teachers to bring universal learning ideas to life in your classroom by creating and sharing your own educational materials is essential. Some of the materials that teachers can carry out to the classroom are:

Class mascot

A class mascot could be a good tool to use in a class. It can be a teddy bear, a doll, or a character that is significant for them.

Puppets

The teacher can create his/her own puppets. The puppets can be made with paper, bags, glove puppets and even puppets made with your hands or fingers. This technique is very useful if you apply it to develop activities such as, stories, dialogues, and sketches.

Paper dolls

This could be a good option to teach topics such as, the body parts, and clothing.

Picture cards

In here, the teacher can collect several drawings, pictures or cut-outs from magazines. They would be created in different size. It depends on the activity that the teachers want to do with the students. Then, the teacher may assign those picture cards to each student to develop the topic.

Card games

Most of the teachers use this technique to develop a topic. Card games can help students to memorize words just seeing them since thanks to those games they will recognize them later. Find innovative games that teach critical thinking.

Word/sentences cards

In here, the teachers can make cards that contain words or sentences that students are used to hear during the classes, so they can recognize and know how they are written.

I would add more of these tools to the list of materials that teachers need to have to improve their teaching process, and they would be:

Calendar, a clock, maps, wallcharts, toys, building blocks, cassette recorders, projector, and all the things that the teacher thinks are necessary.

There are several tools that teacher can use for the teaching process. However, there will be some of them that will not be appropriate or useful for any student that is why, teachers must have several more options in order to supply every student’s necessities. Textbooks, audio and video recordings, websites, and teacher-designed worksheets, tasks, and activities represent just some of the many “tools of the trade” for language and literacy teachers and learners.

Teaching/learning materials such as these play a very important role in the classroom and thus deserve careful analysis and evaluation to ensure that they are engaging, supporting and inspiring learners to the fullest extent possible. One way to check if these tools will work for the students is to examine the materials for the knowledge processes, to experience, and to analyze them.

Nowadays, technology plays a big role in the teaching process that is why, some teachers have started to use apps to make the process more efficient, and the students can be more interested about it since technology is a topic in which students are very familiar with. 

EFL, ESOL, EIL, LELF, English as a global Language

EFL, ESOL, ESL, EIL, ELF English as a global language

People often talk about English as a global language or lingua franca. More than 350 million people around the world speak English as a first language and more than 430 million speak it as a second language.  there are English speakers in most countries around the world. So Why is English so popular, though? And why has it become a global language?

People often call English the international language of business, and it’s true because as international trade expands every year, bringing new countries into contact. Many of the best opportunities are given to people who speak English, so speaking it well can put you in a position to get the best chance anywhere. Most multinational companies require a certain degree of English proficiency from employees, so in order to get a position with a top company, more and more people are learning English.

English is universal language. It is the world’s second native language, and we should know that it is called a “global language” because it has achieved the official position and education preference in every nation, that the language will finally come to be used by more people than any other language. The essential reason to make a language global or international is the power of its people.

What does a global language do?

When a new language is introduced to new communities, and a new better life is achieved by the new language, it makes people prefer to use the language than their own language. 

The language has many acronyms, so let’s talk about each of them:

EFL

English as a foreign language is a traditional term for the use or study of the English language by non-native speakers in countries where English is not a local medium of communication. The best example for this is our case as Salvadoran students of the English language since in El Salvador our native language is Spanish even though we learn the English language, but we continue being non-native speakers of it. If those same students were in the U.S learning English, they would be considered ESL students.

It is important to know the difference between EFL and ESL. As i already said EFL is where the teacher teaches English to students in a country where English isn’t the native language and ESL is where English is taught to students in a country where English is the primary language. For example, a Salvadoran student learning English in the U.S.

The difference between ESL and EFL might seem little at first, but they require very different teaching strategies to meet the objectives of the students.

ESOL

This acronym means English for Speakers of Other Languages. English taught to people whose first language is not English, but who live in an English-speaking country and need English to communicate in daily life. According to some studies, this term is used especially in the UK, Ireland, and New Zealand.

EIL

This acronym means English as international language. English as an international language has been proposed as viable substitutes for the old EFL / ESL models. In part to overcome the shortcomings and inaccuracies of previous models and also to respond to the changing needs of students, who are affected by the process of globalization. EIL refers to the use of English by people of different nations to communicate one another, and it opens new avenues for research.

ELF

This acronym means English as a lingua franca. The term English as a lingua franca (ELF) refers to the teaching, learning, and use of the English language as a common means of communication for speakers of different native languages. ELF is used most often between non-native speakers of English, but this fact does not mean that native speakers are excluded from ELF communication.

For example, in a place where there are many people. All of them from different countries, speaking different languages; This people could not communicate in their native language because nobody is going to understand what the other person is saying since they speak different languages, but also, they have one language in common which is English.

This people from different countries would use the language that have in common to understand each other, so that is what we called lingua franca.

There are too many reasons to choose English as a lingua franca, and among them we have:

·         There are 2 billion speakers.

·         It focuses on native speaker approach.

·         It is a global phenomenon.

did you know?

NESTs vs Non-NESTs

NEST VS NON-NEST
First at all, we have to know the meaning about NETS and non-NEST, both are important in a world in which people want to know lot of knowledge with a second language because people want to be more preparation or they want to be more efficient and have more abilities in a competitive world. So for that reason people have considered that have knowledge of a second language is very important. But, It can be a hard way. If they are supported in someone who is a nest or non-nest teacher. So, what is the best to learn a second language?, who can give us a good knowledge about a foreign language?.

As we know a NEST (Native English-speaking Teacher) is someone who is a native speaker or her/his language is the mother tongue since they were a baby. We can appreciate or notice as a good teacher who can give us a good knowledge because they know as well this language.

Non-NEST (non-Native English-speaking teacher) is someone who have the objective of learning a second language to teacher to someone else a foreign language.
The controversy over native vs non-native distinction has also been brought , the native English-speaking Teacher and its opposite, the non-native English- speaking teacher, have been politically incorrect phrases, and those who still use them can expect to be accused of employing discriminatory language. The superordinate terms “native speaker” and “non-native speaker” seem to persist in the language use of researchers and teachers a like. 

The perseverance with these terms may be that most teachers as well as their students, do to come from either English-speaking or non-English-speaking countries, most of them are either native or no-native speakers of English.
Of course, it doesn’t mean that a native or no-native teacher couldn’t have some mistakes to teach. So, for that reason is necessary to have good knowledge or techniques to apply with no-native speaker as learners. They know, it can be difficult to learn quickly. But, with their knowledge it can be easier.
So, as a conclusion we can say that learn from a no-nest or a nest, we have the probability to learn as well a second language if they have the conscious to catch all the information to learn as soon as possible.