just another piece of my work
“How to Make an
English Language Lesson Interesting”.
Introduction
Teaching English can be fun and
exciting for students if the teacher can bring excitement to their English
lessons. Teaching English lesson is
always challenging because English lesson always take a lot of preparations and
forethought. We might have to plan
lessons according to the levels of the students and make sure that our lessons
will become interactive so that as students will feel free to participate.
We should always bear in mind that
when students participate in our English lessons then we are well on the way of
becoming a successful English teacher.
To make our English lessons more meaningful for our class, we have to
know and realize that as an English teacher would not only have to attract the
students to learn and also at the same time make the lesson interesting.
Definition
Learning
defined as the
acquisition of knowledge or skills through study, experience or being taught.
Definition of LEARNING
by MerriamWebster Dictionary
: knowledge or skill acquired by
instruction or study
: modification of a behavioral
tendency by experience (as exposure to conditioning)
learn·ing (lûr
n
ng)
nng)
n.Defined by The Free Dictionary By Farlex The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English
Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated
in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
1.
The
act, process, or experience of gaining knowledge or skill.
3. Psychology Behavioral modification especially through
experience or conditioning.
Teaching English lessons requires us
to play along with the levels of the students.
To touch people who already know the language, we have a primary
intention that is to make them evaluate the beauty of the language and get them
to appreciate literature. We have to
remove the errors they make in speaking the language; we have to replace their
colloquialisms with refined language. We
have to prepare our lessons in order to fine-tune the language that our
students are already speaking and avoid them from making obvious grammatical
mistakes. It is a daunting task in
itself, since people who already converse in English will find it quite
difficult to change the language they are accustomed to even through it is
wrong.
It will be different situation for
the students who are alien to the language.
We can say it is a whole new ballgame.
Our primary attention then is to create in their basic conversation
skills for the language. We might have
to begin with the most basic approaches at conversation and their work on our
way upwards. Furthermore, these students
might be more receptive at learning and will probably hang on every word that
we say.
Hence, we need to speak slowly. Teaching English lessons requires us to be unpredictable
in class. Quite often too, some teachers
will become quite a bit of bore when find out that their students already have
an indication of the methods of their teacher.
In spite of this, as a language teacher we have to keep charging our
strategies time and again this will enliven us and also can prevent the lessons
from being bored for the teacher himself/herself.
Well as a teacher we can do several
things to keep our classroom active.
There are some activities or a range of learning activities and
practises like reading, grammar, writing, word or spelling games that will
challenge children in a fun interactive ways.
To teach English mean they have to use and practice the language
regularly.
Playing games is the most affective
things we can do and we can browse them on the internet for various games on
building vocabulary, grammar and conversation skills that we can adapt to the
classroom format. Here, we need to make
sure the games will be interesting to the student and will teach them
something, but we do not have to repeat the games which become again
predictable and boring.
Play acting or role-play also one of
a very good method of teaching English lessons with subtlety and keeping up the
interest alive. We can use a format in
which by establish roles for ourselves and for a small group of students and
have a mock conversation. As an example, play the role of a ticket issuer and
the students play the roles of customers.
We would also play a scenario in which they are asking for tickets and I
am asking them questions on what they exactly want. This really can helps in making them more
confident in the language and shedding inhibitions in conversing with people.
Elocutions, debates, extempore
speeches, recitations all of them help to build our student’s
conversation. Teaching English lessons
requires us to test our students regularly.
Need to remember that we need to test them to find out and to know where
they are getting at.
Hence, we must devise various means to test them and keep it as soft
test that the test in which that we can assure the students will perform
well. That will give them a confidence
boost and they will actually look forward to do more tests.
We also need comprehension as also
among the best way to test an English class and we can raise the difficulty bar
based on their level of competency. Written comprehension tests are good but
activities like conduct audio or even visual comprehension tests, then they
would be which better. Make students
listen to a simple audio clipping of two people talking and then ask them
questions on it or make them hear a song and ask them about the lyrics.
English class does not have to be
limited to instruction from textbooks or mundane homework assignments. We can add fur to our classes by introducing
new learning activities that can get students excited about class and help them
learn English more effectively. We want
our students to be intellectually challenged and able to build analytical
thinking skills through the activities.
We need to put forth a little bit of
effort in learning English. We should
understand that to get the student interested, teachers have to incorporate for
activities and games into the lesson plan.
Reading, writing and speaking games are essential skills for our
student. It takes time to learn to read,
to write and spell and it may a life time to be perfect in these skills. Never the less it is good to build a good
foundation because it will serve us well
in the long run with reading, writing and spelling games we will be surprised
to find out how much we can improve. For
speaking, pronunciation and listening activities as a great task for our
students to lose their accent or to speak English that will sound correctly and
can adopt to the right pronunciation too.
For more, here also some ideas how
to enhance our lessons to make them more interesting. For sure this changed might bring us to feel
more comfortable teaching to each lesson.
We should branch out a little bit then have bits of advice/tips to make
our English lessons more interesting and meaningful for our students.
1.) Worksheets
are wonderful
The textbook
usually provides a few good worksheet-type activities. Unfortunately, these
tend to be short and the students are bored by them. We can find plenty of websites online that provide
worksheets for various subjects. We can even make our own. An easy worksheet
that we can make includes "filling in the blanks." Whenever the
students will watch or listen to a dialogue, make a worksheet that has the
dialogue typed out. Take a few words out and replace them with blanks (________).
The students must pay close attention to what is being said in order to fill
out the worksheet.
After these types
of activities I like to check the answers verbally with the students and then
we speak the dialogue together or role-play.
2.) Play Games
Make English fun.
School doesn't have to be about sitting in a desk and having information thrown
at us. Everyone knows that! The great thing about games is that we can always
incorporate our lesson into the game itself. The best kind of game is one that
makes the students speak English with each other. When us as the teacher aren't
talking, that means the students are. Isn't that the goal of teaching English
anyway? For ideas on games, check out some of my other articles on Associated
Content regarding ESL lesson plans.
3.) Use visuals
I cannot stress
this enough! Humans in general are very visual creatures. Younger children
almost always need to visualize something in order to understand it, especially
when learning a foreign language. Employ power points (the more pictures, the
better), short skits and movie, flash cards, etc. You-tube is an excellent
source for material, as well. You can often find plenty of ESL stuff by typing
"ESL" on the You-tube search engine.
4.) Teach
popular songs
This is one of my favourites.
Have you ever noticed that it's incredibly easy to remember song lyrics? I
always thought it was funny how I could know 100's of words to popular songs
but not remember what I needed to know for my history test! The reason is
because our minds remember melodies much easier than we do basic text.
Look for some
great and ESL-friendly songs that your students can learn. Try to find a song
with vocabulary from your current lesson. Having the key sentence in there is
even better. I often spend 15 minutes on one song and hand out a worksheet with
the lyrics and a few blanks (see #1). The students love it! Some great songs
I've used from You-Tube are: Lemon Tree, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, and Cliff Richard's Summer Holiday.
5.) Get
physical
That's right!
There are plenty of ways you can get your students up and moving. TPR, or
"Total Physical Response," is one of the most effective ways to teach
something. I like to do TPR as a warm up for each class. For example, "Put
your hands on your head. Clap 2 times. Pick up your book." The students
must listen carefully and by actually doing what they hear they remember much
more of the information.
Another way to
'get physical,' is by role-playing. It's one thing to listen and repeat a
dialogue, but if you have your students speak the dialogue together in front of
the class you will likely have a better response. One last "get
physical" idea is charades or miming.
Conclusion
As a conclusion to teach English is
a very hard and heavy task but still if we prepare with the knowledge, ideas
and some resources the period of our lesson can turn to be something that enjoy and fun. Beside learning English at the beginning
should be fun and interesting and we need to interact them by providing the
students with plenty of language models. Learning English through the use of
gaming and many types of activities is not actually a new concept. However the evolution of this type of
educational activities method has evolved tremendously from simple word games
to utilizing work to involve a method of learning that is both fun and
affective.
Learning a new language can be
difficult and English is one of the toughest languages to learn. By incorporating ad education game we add fun
to a dull subject, depends to us as a teacher to give our pupils the best in
order to master the skills and us also for achieving the objectives of our
lesson every day. Thus learning does not
mean we can achieve in only a day but it is a process and make sure that the
pupils is not missed or for sure to learn means to explore and experience whatever
we want them to master as our aim for each lesson in the class.
REFERENCES
http://www.com/articles/teaching-english-lessons.html
How to Make an English Class Fun | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_7719454_make-english-class-fun.html#ixzz2A0lN93iu
blog.britishcouncil.org/2012/11/01/english-change-lives/.
Task B
Choose an activity from your essay and carry it out in class.
Distribute feedback forms to students. [State the number of students who
responded to the feedback form]. Explain how you carry out the activity, analyze
the findings and provide conclusion.
How
to carry out the activity
-Refer to the
appendix
Analyze
the findings
By the end of the lesson, from the
feedback forms that been distributed to about 10 of pupils in the class, most
of them said that they really enjoy the activity that been carried out in the
class. They love to sing and they enjoy
doing it. The lesson is only 30 minutes
and the class is from year 2 pupils for the singing activity. Though at first they all mentioned that it’s
hard for them to pronounce the words but because of the rhythms of the song
they can sing along. They keep repeating
and sing the song again and again and they keep remember the lyrics.
Basically, based on the activity my pupils found it is very easy and
interesting to learn English through songs, stories and games that are very
lively close to their everyday life.
They also have good opportunities to take part in the lesson and built
up their self confidence to use the language from time to time and become much
better always, they started to love English because of all the activities will
make them to enjoy, take part and doing things.
Conclusion
Young learners or students from the
primary school should have fun with English.
They should engage in enjoyable activities designed specifically for
young learners such as songs, chants, finger plays or storytelling. Teaching English to our students is a rapidly
growing field around the world and English Education is increasingly found at
the primary levels. They will have good opportunities to improve all the four
skills and those are listening, speaking, reading and writing. It also will make the lesson really exciting
and attractive.
Excellent article .. very useful tips to improve teaching development
ReplyDeleteThanks Rosidah Abu Bakar...
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