Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (23 page)

If one student is unhappy about the lesson, arrange to talk to him about it afterwards and before he convinces everyone else in the class that he’s right and you’re wrong. Some students just want to be heard or at least to be satisfied that you’re doing your best under the circumstances.

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Students who bully, shun or mock other students in the class.
Employ a zero tolerance attitude in this case. The thing is, these students may not be aware of how strangers see them and are used to getting away with anti-social behaviour. When you show that you just won’t accept it, they’re forced to analyse what they’re doing. Even if they feel that their behaviour is normal in their society, they need to know that in the society they hope to access, the English-speaking countries by and large, it won’t wash.

Racial prejudices, sexism and age discrimination may not be law-breaking offences in every land but the way you handle these issues gives students valuable knowledge about how to curb their tongues abroad.

Handling a lack of participation

If your classroom is worryingly quiet, you have a problem on your hands, but fear not, you have ways to increase student participation.

Firstly, it’s easier to change yourself than anyone else, so look at your own level of enthusiasm. Keep your energy levels high throughout your lesson (I often have a soft drink on hand, which I can craftily sip to prevent getting dull and dehydrated) and act as though you have full confidence in the success of every activity you present. Cheerfulness is infectious so make sure that you’re not a misery guts in class.

Another thing you can do is to ensure that you put your questions simply and create tasks at the appropriate level. Your students are likely to clam up if they don’t understand what they have to do.

A nice trick is to drop the level of an activity you present in class so that the students can just concentrate on speaking without grappling with new words and grammar. This may boost their confidence a bit for next time.

Have a look at the pairings and groups you use in class as well. Some combinations amongst the students may not work well. Perhaps two very shy people together don’t participate because neither wants to go first. So, rear-range the students frequently by asking them to sit in alphabetical order sometimes, and in order of their birthdays at other times. Just sorting that out requires communication from the students.

You can do speaking activities in concentric circles: in a class of ten students, you have five standing in a circle in the middle, all facing outwards and then five in a circle all around them facing inwards. The inner circle remain still, but the outer circle rotate every few minutes so that they all speak to a different person at regular intervals. It’s very helpful for students to do an activity more than once because they improve each time but it doesn’t seem boring when they have a different partner for each attempt.

Chapter 9: Who’s The Boss around Here? Managing Your Classroom
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Attending to poor attendance

Poor attendance is a real pain because it affects the progress the class can make. On the other hand, progress also depends on who is turning up to lessons and if you have a hard core of good attenders, You don’t need to worry so much about the persistent no show. However, if different people come each time, the only thing you can do is to review previously taught information at the beginning of each lesson.

A course book is a great back-up for students who missed last week or last night as they can at least read through the material by themselves, which allows them to take responsibility for their own learning (if they don’t turn up or do their reading, it’s their problem not yours).

Of course there may be good reasons why students don’t come along, including something you can perhaps change. So try to keep the lines of communication open by asking your students how they’re getting on and whether they’d like to suggest any improvements to the course. Of course, you do need to be thick skinned enough to accept constructive criticism.

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Part III

Teaching Skills

Classes

In this part . . .

Listening, speaking, reading and writing: the four

cornerstone skills of English. Welcome to Part III,

which shows you how to master delivering skills skilfully.

I dedicate a chapter to each of these main skills, with a

special bonus chapter on pronunciation, since it’s such a

key component of accurate spoken communication.

Along the way I sprinkle tips on how to keep your lessons

lively and how to involve all your students, at whatever

level they might be.

Chapter 10

Taken as Read: Teaching

Reading Lessons

In This Chapter

▶ Finding reading material

▶ Revealing reading skills

▶ Working with words

▶ Developing associated skills

▶ Presenting a reading lesson plan

Reading is one of the key skills in language learning. It reinforces the skills students acquire in speaking, listening and writing. On the other hand, it really isn’t enough just to put a book or short text in front of students and ask them to read, whether silently or out loud.

You can help students develop a host of sub-skills through activities around reading. And, you can make life easier by selecting reading material that’s both at the right level and somewhat interesting.

Many students insist that they prefer to focus on speaking, but before long they want to browse through an English newspaper or read the notices on the Underground. Reading skills help round out your students’ English, so in this chapter I focus on this key skill.

Choosing a Text

You can choose from an immense variety of things to read in English –

novels, blogs, poems, ads, newspapers, magazines or just flashcards – the list is endless.

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Choose a piece of writing that your students are likely to be interested in and is at the right level for them, even if it’s just a couple of words long and written on the board. They should be able to understand most of the words on a printed page except for a handful of new words, which you have a strategy for dealing with.

Starting with the ABCs

The alphabet is the most basic reading text you can choose. For EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers, using the English alphabet is second nature, but this isn’t the case for all EFL students. It may surprise you to know that few students, even those at intermediate level, are comfortable with all 26 letters in their various shapes and sizes – capitals, lower case, handwriting and print.

It never hurts to run through the alphabet at the outset of a course. Make sure that everyone in the class can recognise and say the letters out loud.

Actually you can organise the letters of the alphabet in a memorable way to help students pronounce them accurately. If you’re already familiar with
phonemes
(the symbols used to represent all the different sounds in the language), you can use them to group the letters. If not, refer to Chapter 12 for more information.

Even if you don’t use the phonemic symbols, rhyming the letters makes things clearer for your students. A good place to start is to analyse the groups and say the letters in Table 10-1 out loud. You can hear that with the exception of the last group the others are similar in the way they’re pronounced. This form of analysis based on sound pushes students out of any complacency, as they may believe that they know all the letters based on visual recognition.

Pay particular attention to the vowels. Even higher-level students get them wrong.

Table 10-1

Letters, Sounds and Phonemic Symbols

Letters

Sound

Phonemic Symbol

A, J, K, H

ei
as in day or weigh

/ei/

F, L, M, N, S, X, Z

e
as in egg or let

/e/

B, C, D, E, G, P, T, V

ee
as in tree or wheat

/i/

I, Y

ai
as in my or lie

/ai/

Q, U, W

oo
as in you or blue

/u/

O, R

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Make sure that your students have a copy of the alphabet in the correct order as well. They need it when using the dictionary.

Practise the alphabet in a fun way by using popular acronyms or abbreviations and see if the students know what they mean. Try these for example:

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ATM: Automated teller machine

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BBC: British Broadcasting Corporation

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BMX: Bicycle motorcross

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DVD: Digital versatile disc

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SMS: Short message service

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UNICEF: United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund Reading whole words

Remember how you were taught to recognise individual words back in primary school? The teacher would hold up flashcards and the kids shouted the words out. Well in EFL, lower-level students learn word by word too.

Write new words on the board as soon as the class has repeated the pronunciation. At the same time, help your students to read well by pointing out spelling patterns. After all, English is notoriously difficult to spell and pronounce even for native speakers, so reading aloud can be very daunting for EFL students.

These simple examples of English spelling rules make a world of difference to people learning to read in English:

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The letter
e
after a vowel and consonant together softens/lengthens the vowel sound. Compare rid and ride, mad and made, or cut and cute.

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When the letter ‘s’ is between two vowels, it’s pronounced like a
z
– rise

/raiz/, present /prezənt/ and pose /pəυz/.

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At the beginning of a word gn, kn, and pn are pronounced /
n
/.

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Wh
is pronounced /
w
/. There’s no need to pronounce the ’h’.

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Wr
is pronounced /
r
/. The ‘w’ is always silent.

You probably know all these rules instinctively but your students need you to spell them out. If you think of any other rules, make a note of them as your students will be eternally grateful.

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Graduating from words to sentences with

the help of punctuation

In order for students to understand complete sentences on paper, they need an idea of sentence structure and punctuation.

From beginner stage, point out what apostrophes, commas and other marks do. Using a slow deliberate change in your intonation as you read often makes this clear.

Make sure that you know the function of all these punctuation marks and how they affect a sentence:

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.
Full stop: This mark shows the end of a complete sentence.

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:
Colon: You use a colon before you introduce a list, example or the second part of a sentence that gives more detail about the first part.

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;
Semi-colon: When two sentences are very closely related the writer can make them into one sentence separated by this mark.

I love the Caribbean; I’ve lived there for years.

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‘’
Quotation/speech marks: You use these to show the beginning and end of what someone actually said, in that person’s words.

He said, ‘See you tonight’.

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,
Comma
:
This mark indicates a pause, as if you were saying the words aloud. You sometimes use a comma instead of brackets when giving extra information and also to separate items on list. So a comma can replace the words
and
and
or
to avoid repeating them
.

My favourite dishes, or foreign ones anyway, are curry, lasagne and paella.

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‘
Apostrophe: Use an apostrophe to show that some letters are left out or that something belongs to someone.

She can’t (cannot) drive Paul’s car.

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( )
Brackets/parentheses: Brackets show an interruption in the sentence for the writer to add additional information.

The house (an ugly place) is still for sale.

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-
Hyphen: This is used to join two words or parts of words together.

There was a break-in at the home of his ex-wife.