Teacher Talk... How to motivate students in the classroom . A way to improve students' self esteem

MORE TEACHING ENGLISH AND OTHER ASPECTS

By Professor Licda. Cindy Gutiérrez Navarro
cgutierrez_m@costarricense.cr

PRINCIPLE OF LANGUAGE TEACHING 1

            The content and methodology of the teaching should be consistent with the objectives of the course and should meet the needs and wants of the learners.

MATERIAL DEVELOPMENT

·         Take into account authentic material not designed for language teaching purposes.

·         Create material to be used as a resource and not as a script or recipe.

                                                  

PRINCIPLE OF LANGUAGE TEACHING 2

            The teaching should be designed to help learners to achieve language development and not just language acquisition: Teachers should aim to help their learners to develop the ability to use language fluently, accurately, appropriately, and effectively in numerous genres and for numerous purposes. It prepares the learners for the reality of language use, but can also positively affect their self esteem and help them to develop communicative competence, cognitive academic language proficiency and functional literacy.

MATERIAL DEVELOPMENT

·         Create materials that involve and encourage the use of high level skills as imaging, using inner speech, making connections, predicting, interpreting, evaluating and applying.

·         Material should provide opportunities to use the target language to achieve intended outcomes in a range of genres and text types for a range of objectives.

·         The materials should help the teacher to assess the learners and to give constructive feedback in relation to achievement of intended outcomes.

 HIGH LEVEL SKILLS

·         Imaging

·          Using inner speech

·          Making connections

·          Predicting

·          Interpreting

·          Evaluating

·         Applying

 WAYS TO POSITIVELY AFFECT STUDENTS’ SELF ESTEEM

·         Use of materials designed to fulfill students’ likes, interests and needs: Most educational programs present objectives and contents need to be adapted to individual students’ situations because they lack of reality in the sense that they are designed for students belonging to a particular context.

·         Use of Technology in the Classrooms: When students are using technology as a tool or a support for communicating with others, they are in an active role rather than the passive role of recipient of information transmitted by a teacher, textbook, or broadcast. The student is actively making choices about how to generate, obtain, manipulate, or display information. Technology use allows many more students to be actively thinking about information, making choices, and executing skills than is typical in teacher-led lessons. Moreover, when technology is used as a tool to support students in performing authentic tasks, the students are in the position of defining their goals, making design decisions, and evaluating their progress .
http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/EdReformStudies/EdTech/effectsstudents.html

·         Use of Cooperative Learning in the Classroom: As stated by David W. Johnson, Roger T. Johnson, Edythe Johnson Holubec ( 1991), students must have:

1-Positive Interdependence: Students perceive that they need each other in order to complete the group's task ("sink or swim together"). Teachers may structure positive interdependence by establishing mutual goals (learn and make sure all other group members learn), joint rewards (if all group members achieve above the criteria, each will receive bonus points), shared resources (one paper for each group or each member receives part of the required information), and assigned roles (summarizer, encourager of participation, elaborator).

2-Face-to-Face Promotive Interaction: Students promote each other's learning by helping, sharing, and encouraging efforts to learn. Students explain, discuss, and teach what they know to classmates. Teachers structure the groups so that students sit knee-to-knee and talk through each aspect of the assignment.

3-Individual Accountability: Each student's performance is frequently assessed and the results are given to the group and the individual. Teachers may structure individual accountability by giving an individual test to each student or randomly selecting one group member to give the answer.

4-Interpersonal And Small Group Skills: Groups cannot function effectively if students do not have and use the needed social skills. Teachers teach these skills as purposefully and precisely as academic skills. Collaborative skills include leadership, decision-making, trust-building, communication, and conflict-management skills.

5-Group Processing: Groups need specific time to discuss how well they are achieving their goals and maintaining effective working relationships among members. Teachers structure group processing by assigning such tasks as (a) list at least three member actions that helped the group be successful and (b) list one action that could be added to make the group even more successful tomorrow. Teachers also monitor the groups and give feedback on how well the groups are working together to the groups and the class as a whole.

http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/cooplrn.html

·         Use of Communicative language teaching in the classroom: The communicative language teaching is an approach to the teaching of second and foreign languages that emphasizes interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of learning a language. Some classroom activities suggested are: Example Activities, Role Play, Interviews, Information Gap, Games, Language Exchanges, Surveys and Pair Work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_language_teaching

·         Make use of Dynamic activities for Increasing Self-Esteem in Teenagers:  Some activities include Quizes, Interviews, Stories, Brochures and Using Talents.

http://www.ehow.com/list_7196836_activities-increasing-self_esteem-teenagers.html

COGNITIVE ACADEMIC LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY

CALP refers to formal academic learning. This includes listening, speaking, reading, and writing about subject area content material. This level of language learning is essential for students to succeed in school. Students need time and support to become proficient in academic areas. This usually takes from five to seven years. Recent research (Thomas & Collier, 1995) has shown that if a child has no prior schooling or has no support in native language development, it may take seven to ten years for ELLs to catch up to their peers.

Academic language acquisition isn't just the understanding of content area vocabulary. It includes skills such as comparing, classifying, synthesizing, evaluating, and inferring. Academic language tasks are context reduced. Information is read from a textbook or presented by the teacher. As a student gets older the context of academic tasks becomes more and more reduced.

The language also becomes more cognitively demanding. New ideas, concepts and language are presented to the students at the same time.

Jim Cummins also advances the theory that there is a common underlying proficiency (CUP) between two languages. Skills, ideas and concepts students learn in their first language will be transferred to the second language.

http://www.everythingesl.net/inservices/bics_calp.php

Developing Listening Skills

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Powerpoint cursob2

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MATERIALS TO DEVELOP THE SPEAKING SKILL

Prof. Licda. Cindy Gutiérrez Navarro

cgutierrez_m@costarricense.cr

                According to author Rebecca Hughes,  it is necessary to make students  understand that speaking is the basis of all human relationships and the first means to form their own identity which differentiate it from written communication in the sense that it has to be spontaneous and not edited and reread. Moreover, the understanding of cultural and pragmatic use of the language requires special attention to avoid misuses of expressions as well as misunderstandings of them. Finally, to carry out real-time conversations it is a must to possess a rich competence about the language in order to produce a rich performance when speaking. That is why some recommendable activities to develop such skill are affecting students’ interests and emotions, providing informal day to day encounters, putting into practice public formal uses of the language like interviews and speeches, and expose them to local and international varieties of English.

                          In addition, the previously stated differences between spoken and written discourse, collaboration among learners and cultural differences in the use of the language are also of prior importance when teaching and learning English.

Theory states that the most important aspects to focus on when preparing material to develop the speaking skill take root on the study of spoken corpora, insights from conversation analysis, work on affect and creativity, interactional linguistics and speech processing and psycholinguistics.

                          Considering the information above, there is a big controversy about the aims of our development of the speaking skill in the classroom: do our materials elicit only chunks of speaking or they make our students produce accurately, fluently and in context? It is something which needs to be clear and of course; if the second option is chosen, the process will be widely successful.
An example of materials and information to encourage the use of speaking skills in context can be accessed to the following link...

http://www.englishclub.com/english-for-work/hotel-reservation.htm

EVOLUTION OF INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS DESIGN

USES OF TEXTBOOKS IN THE ENGLISH CLASS

Prof. Licda. Cindy Gutiérrez Navarro
cgutierrez_m@costarricense.cr

According to the Florida Department of Education (2008), effective materials must include features like instructional goals with adaptability to course requirements; accurate, relevant and relatively up-to-date information; appropriate reading level vocabulary and real-world applications or informational skills among others.
In regards to these materials, textbooks are known to be the most dominant tools when teaching English. Most of the time, such textbooks include teacher’s manuals to complement and enrich their use. Such manuals need to be practical, complete, content aligned, readable as well as possess accurate methods to apply, assessments and outlines to organize and manage lessons and classes
Sometimes, textbooks and other material to teach English could face problems related to controversies about how best to approach the specific subject areas, inaccurate contents which do not treat the subject matters the way they deserve or even contain factual errors which mislead content analysis in the sense that contents are not either complete or mistakenly treated.
Moreover, the presentation of the materials is an issue here. It is a must to take into account teachers’ and students’ resources, alignment of instructional component, organization, pacing and easy of use in order to apply them in class. Students’ resources have to be attractive but not too much to be misleading and reference aids such as index, glossaries and maps. On the other hand, teachers’ resources need to have materials easy to use and to support lesson planning, teaching and learning, suggestions for adaptation to special needs and guidelines to evaluate instruction. The alignment of instructional components of students and teachers’ materials plus their organization, content, format, objectives, unity, consistency, readability, language styles and typographical presentations are also of a prior importance when working with them.

PRIORITIES FOR EVALUATING INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS

Prof. Licda. Cindy Gutiérrez Navarro

cgutierrez_m@costarricense.cr

As stated by the Florida Department of Education (2008),in order to teach English, it is necessary to consider the learning conditions each student in the classroom possesses. The determination whether the type of learning we want to accomplish is developing critical thinking and analysis in our students, or forming strategic learners of contents needs to be carried out. Moreover, we must pay attention to students’ expertise levels about the language. That is, high expertise level students do not require the same strategies that low expertise ones do. High ones need direct information and low ones intense constructivism.

To focus our students’ learning, we have to provide students with high motivational and relevant activities plus appealing challenges to arouse their interest and make them establish personal connections with the information studied to improve their learning. There are even students who require practical applications to learn. Furthermore, the feedback given during and after the treatment of subject matters and about how they are learning help them reflect about this own important process.

In addition, the teaching of major ideas taking into account students’ major work to develop core thinking skills about setting goals, making comparisons, inferring, evaluating and others besides considering correctness, explicit and clear directions and explanations, excluding ambiguous terms or aspects, an alignment of strategies with outcome and a useful guidance and support by facilitators contribute to enhance, encourage and enrich the students’ learning process. If fulfilling, the previous aspects successfully, students’ responses are going to be more effective since they would be able to make identifications, discussions, summaries, relations, explanations and others as a result of their application.

PRINCIPLES OF EFFECTIVE MATERIALS DEVELOPMENT

By Prof. Licda.Cindy Gutiérrez Navarro

cgutierrez_m@costarricense.cr

According to author Brian Tomlinson (1998), in his article "Principles of Effective Materials Development", teachers must take into account certain principles for material creation to guide themselves in their goal of teaching English to their students in their everyday labor. Such principles have to do especially with the role students have in the classroom. Namely, teachers must consider their pupils´cultural background, needs and interests because depending on their identification with the material used in class, their learning, development and application of the language will become more  spontaneous, authentic and of course more accurate and fluent.

Personally speaking, I strongly agree with his position. Our students must work with activities which immerse them in everyday-situation experiences. We as teachers, must adapt the contents we are to follow in the educational plannings to our students real contexts in order to make them feel  affectionately identified with the use of the language taught to ease their learning of it.
As a conclusion, it is a fact that the materials we, as teachers create every day for giving our  English classes to our students, play such an important role in their learning and use of the language that sometimes we cannot even measure the positive effects they have on them.

Teaching with pumpkins