Foreing Languages

How should English Foreign Language be taught?

This essay contains my reflection on how English as a foreign Language should be taught. I am going to write some strategies, techniques, and ideas of how to teach English, what can make a successful teacher, and about the class management according to some authors and why I agree or not with them. I think that the culture should be part of the teaching, so I will mention that deeper latter, and last but not least I will write some words about the teachers´ heart.

First at all I am going to give my opinion about the topic. According to my experience I can say that English should be taught in a dynamic way I mean the learners and the teacher need to be active in order to have an entertained class because I think in this way the students learn easily, they are practicing the language and at the same time they are learning.

(Davies, 2008:17) says in his book:

“Is important to remember that learner needs to be able

to do more than just remember and repeat new items;

they must be able to use them actively to communicate”

(Davies, 2008:17)

I agree with Davies because I consider that learn a foreign language is better when you practice the knowledge in real life, I think it is meaningful for the learner while

learning the language by remembering the information could be boring. Maybe it depends on the learning style of each learner, not all the students learn in the same way, some students can learn by repeating and memorizing the learning and other learn by practicing it.

Although each learner has their own learning style there are some elements which need to be present in a language classroom to help students to learn effectively.

According to Harmer (1998) the three elements are:

• Engage: this is the point in a teaching sequence where teachers try to arouse the students´ interest, thus involving their emotions.

• Study: study activities are those where the students are asked to focus in on languages (or information) and how it is constructed. They range from the study and practice of a single sound to an investigation of how a writer achieves a particular effect in a long text.

• Activate: this element describes exercises and activities which are designed to get students using language as freely and ‘communicatively’ as they can.

The learners could be much more motivated using these three elements. Sometimes they need to be motivated in order to they be interested in the class. The elements are useful and they guide you to teach in a better way, but it will depend on how you manage the

activities. As I mention before, what I think is that putting in practice the new learning you can make it more meaningful.

To practice English in the class and to give better teaching, Davis (2008) mentions some teaching ideas which are:

• Demonstration with actions and objects.

• Gesture and mime.

• Paraphrase.

• Translation.

I consider these ideas good to teach a foreign language because they can make the class more interesting and students can understand better the topic.

I have an experience related to the first point (demonstration with actions and objects). I attended a class where the teacher presented a topic with real objects. She presented ‘clothes’ and she brought her clothes to the class to teach us the vocabulary and it was interesting because some of my classmates passed in front of the rest of the group and they wore those clothes. In my case, I learned the vocabulary faster maybe because I am visual and the objects were real.

Elicitation, gapping and extending to adapting are three stages for activating Techniques according to Jordan (2009). He defined each one as the following:

• Elicitation: is the process of drawing out something, of provoking a response.

• Gapping: it refers to the authentic purpose for communication: transferring information, or bridging

the gap, from one person to another.

• Extending and adapted: are techniques that offer a practical way for teachers to draw on realia and authentic materials to spice up classroom activities.

Realia is mentioned one more time for another author. This is an important activity in the classroom with the students. The use of authentic material is also useful for students because they are exposed to the language, they can listen to a native speaker talk and do an activity the listening with that, or watch an English movie, it is funny for students and they can learn vocabulary from it. The good thing of use authentic materials is that if you want you can use the same article, movie, video, etc. for the different levels (beginners, intermediate, advance) you just change the activity according to the level.

There are other suggestions from Harmer about how to teach English as a foreign language. according to Harmer (1998) there are four things that teachers need to do when teaching a foreign language, they are the following: students need to be exposed to the language, understand its meaning, understand its form (how is constructed) and practice it.

I can say that we as future teachers can put in practice the four stages mentioned above. I think they can give good result and the students could

be happy with their work because when they are practicing they will be speaking or writing in English and it is what students like.

There is a method to teach a second language which is called ‘Rassiass Method’, the main purpose of this method is to make students to produce the target language. I have been working with this method in an elementary school; it has given me good results, experiences and happy moments. The kids enjoy when they are speaking English that is what I have achieved and it motivates you as the teacher because you see the kids´ face and you feel you are doing good job.

I wanted to mention my experience above because based on it, I consider it is a great way to teach English as a foreign language and the teachers can teach using Rassiass method, they and the students will enjoy the classes.

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