Comprehension Checks
It’s important to conduct comprehension checks when teaching new material. If you’re not already familiar with these, here’s what you need to know.
Student Projects
Tag: methods
Review by Way of Ordering
One way to review is by putting things in order – whether it’s sequential, by likelihood, or other – since it requires students to compare things see how they relate to one another, which means they’ll need a solid understanding of the topics.
Review Regularly
Frequent review is one of the best ways to help students remember new grammar points; it’s far more effective than a single large review before an exam. Here are some recommended ways to integrate small reviews throughout the week.
Helping Students Pronounce <TH>
Many non-native learners have difficulty pronouncing the <th> sounds because they aren’t present in most other languages. Here are some ways you can address pronunciation at beginner stages.
Poker Idioms
Play poker with your students, teaching them terminology along the way. Afterward, take a look at some common expressions which are literal for poker but can also be applied to other contexts as idioms.
How We Term Clauses
You have to be careful with the terms ‘independent’ and ‘dependent’, since they don’t always actually reflect what we might assume they mean.
Top-Down vs Bottom-Up Processing
We generally teach the structure of a grammar point, and the usage follows. That works well enough for receptive skills, but for productive skills, it feels backward. Maybe we should try the reverse approach.
Practice Rearranging Sentences Often
If you have access to mini-whiteboards, those can be great. Note cards are also good. Your students can use these to quickly restructure sentences.
Identifying Grammar vs Using It
Learning a grammar point shouldn’t just be about knowing how to use it. How to use a grammar structure doesn’t matter until after they’ve determined what they want to say.
Grammar vs Vocab: where to place your focus
Is it better for teachers to focus on grammar or on vocabulary for elementary/intermediate students? Both are important, of course, but there’s only so much a learner can learn at a time.
Why You Don’t Need to Speak Another Language to Teach English
Have you ever been asked, “How can you teach students English if you don’t speak their language?” I get that a lot. It’s not necessary to know the native tongue to teach English. Here’s why.
Teach Aspects instead of Tense Combinations
It’s hard to keep all the tenses straight when they’re taught independently. Try instead to teach the patterns: What is a continuous tense? What is a perfect tense? After you answer those, try applying more specific tenses.
Always Keep Dice with You
When practicing a grammar structure with my class, I often use dice to randomize prompts. This way, students don’t know what they’re supposed to say or write until I tell them the results of a roll, which keeps them on their toes.
3 Alternate Ways to Teach Idioms
With idioms, students already know the words that make up the expression. But since idioms aren’t to be taken literally, they still need to learn the meaning. Instead of teaching idioms like you would other vocabulary terms, why not build off what they already know?
Define Your Own Terms
There are lots of long, strange-sounding, technical terms that we don’t use outside the classroom, so why confuse students by teaching them? Instead, make up your own terms for for those concepts.
Save ‘To Be’ for Later
‘To be’ so often is drilled into students’ minds that they end up using it far more that they should, as if it’s a requirement for every sentence. Starting off with some simple sentences that don’t have am/is/are might be a better way to get started.
Vocab-Building through Associations
There’s a lot of vocabulary to learn, but thankfully plenty of words are related to each other. Learning words by associating them with each other helps us to remember those words later. You can help students establish and strengthen those connections in your students’ minds.
Mistakes on Purpose
When students have the opportunity to correct the teacher, it reinforces that language point, assesses the students’ understanding of that language point, gives the learner confidence, and teaches students to problem-solve.