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Welcome!
Our names are: Iraceli, Andrea and Karla. We're Primary Education students and we are in 7th cycle.

We are glad to have you here!

In this portforlio you will find articles, interviews, podcasts and original material related to Teaching English as a Foreing Language.

We hope you enjoy it. <3

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a. Week 1

Stages of L.A

Having fun with your mother

b. Week 2

The development of theories of second language acquisition.

Behaviorist Theory of Second Language Acquisition

c Week 3

Direct method materials

d. Week 4

How to teach Grammar for kids?

Total Physical Response (TPR)

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e. Week 5

Phonological awareness: phonemic awareness

Phonological awareness game

Blending sounds spelling
This is the perfect game for phonemic awareness

10 Interesting tools to improve students' fluency

f. Week 6

This game is a great resource  to help preschoolers build letter knowledge and early reading skills!

Writing activity for 1º grade

Reading activity for 3º grade

Fun activity to improve your reading and spelling.

e. Week 7

Listening activities for kids

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STAGES OF L.A.

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Having fun with your mother tonge

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GUESS MY DRAWING Sibling Battle Challenge w/The Norris Nuts

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The development of theories of second language acquisition

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Behaviorist Theory of Second Language Acquisition

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Behaviorist Theory of Second Language Acquisition

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HOW LEARNING A SECOND LANGUAGE CAN BENEFIT YOUR CHILD

https://www.ahealthiermichigan.org/2017/08/14/how-kids-benefit-from-learning-a-second-language/

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Direct method materials

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Count to 100: Strategies and Activities - A Kinderteacher Life | Math center activities, Counting activities kindergarten, Counting to 100

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Mar 23, 2019 - Does your students struggle with rote counting? Read this article to learn strategies and activities to teach primary learners how to rote count to 100.

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In the following video you will be able to appreciate the advantages of the correct use of this method, in order to allow greater effectiveness. Therefore, His application in class is essential and necessary to learn a new language

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How to teach Grammar for kids?

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Total Physical Response (TPR)

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Total Physical Response (TPR) - Teacher Training film no. 8

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On this presentation you could appreciate some topic to start teaching grammar for kids.

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Phonological awareness: phonemic awareness

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Phonemic Awareness is such an integral part to reading and writing. Unfortunately, many teach… | Learning phonics, Phonemic awareness, Phonemic awareness activities

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Jan 12, 2017 - Have you ever heard the term phonemic awareness and wondered what it is? I get a lot of emails from parents who are ready to teach their child how to

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Phonological awareness game

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Blending sounds spelling
This is the perfect game for phonemic awareness

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Build bridges by building words in this silly game that tests your kindergartener's knowledge of using blends in spelling! As your child comes across each broken bridge in Blending Sounds Spelling, they'll need to spell a word using letter blocks. Each word has a colorful illustration to help, and a narrator sounds out each letter as your child spells, emphasizing letter sound relationships.

Grade

Subject

View aligned standards

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Blending Sounds Spelling Game | Game | Education.com

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Kids build blending and spelling skills to help get the gang to school in time.

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Online Phonemic Awareness Games
Online exercises to practice sound and Word Discrimination

1.- SOUND MATCH
2.- CHICKEN COOP
3.- WORD GOBBLE

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10 Interesting tools to improve students' fluency

Due to this new modality, ICTs have become our allies as strategies in the teaching-learning process.Here we give you ten alternative to explore:
1.-  ABC Countdown
2.-  FluentU
3.-  Word Whomp
4.-  Greek to Me
5.-  Story Maker 2
6.-  Secret coder
7.-   Wordshake
8.-   Web Tales
9.-   Storyline
10.-  School Radio

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This is a reading activity for 3º grade

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The Reading Machine: Reading Games

Do you want to improve your reading comprehension and make your students more interested?
In this game you will find activities by areas.
Perfect for all the grades!!

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This game is a great resource  to help preschoolers build letter knowledge and early reading skills!

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Up, up, and away! Early readers get practice recognizing letters B, E, and G in this fast-paced alphabet balloon pop game. Balloons with different letters of the alphabet appear out of the windows, and it's your child's job to pop the balloon that matches the correct letter (hint: it's either the letter B, E, or G) as quickly as they can before it disappears. With every correct balloon popped, Floyd gets closer to his hot air balloon ride. This game is a great resource to help preschoolers build letter knowledge and early reading skills!

Grade

Subject

View aligned standards

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Alphabet Balloon Pop Game | Game | Education.com

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Up, up, and away! Early readers get practice recognizing letters B, E, and G in this fast-paced alphabet balloon pop game. Balloons with different letters of the alphabet appear out of the windows, and it's your child's job to pop the balloon that matches the correct letter (hint: it's either the letter B, E, or G) as quickly as they can before it disappears.

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Writing activity for 1º grade

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Secret Sentences Worksheets - CVC and Sight Words - Distance Learning [Video] [Video] | Preschool learning activities, Kids learning activities, Phonics activities

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Oct 26, 2019 - This secret sentence activity is a sure way to engage your students while they are practicing their beginning sounds, sight words and CVC words. To complete the activity, they write the beginning sound of each picture to reveal the secret sentence and then they rewrite the sentence using proper punc...

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Fun activity to improve your reading and spelling.
When Pigs Fly

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Listening activities for kids

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Back to Articles

Listening comprehension is more than simply hearing what is being said. It involves:

the ability to take in information

the ability to respond to instructions

the ability to share ideas, thoughts and opinions.

Overall, listening comprehension is the ability to understand the meaning of words heard and to then be able to relate to them in some way. When your child hears a story, listening comprehension allows them to understand it, remember it, talk about it, and even retell it in their own words.

Children who are good listeners often grow up to become good communicators. It's an important skill to develop at an early age and, like a muscle, it needs regular exercise to grow stronger. Below are eight everyday ways you can help build your child's listening comprehension skills at home.

1. Get their full attention

Encourage your child to look at you when they listen. Their full attention is important, and this gets them into the habit of giving their full attention to what's being said.

2. Make reading an interactive activity

While reading aloud, stop before turning the page and ask, "What do you think will happen next?" Ask your child to explain their answer to see how well they've been listening. If they haven't been listening, avoid criticizing and instead, aim to get them into a fun habit of predicting what will happen next.

3. Play listening games

Games like Simon Says helps your child build listening comprehension skills in a fun and rewarding way. You can even make up your own listening games at home. For example, ask your child to find objects around the house by giving them two‑part verbal instructions, then gradually progress to three‑part, four‑part, and so on.

4. Play "story chain"

This is a fun activity that the whole family can play together. Have one person start an original story by saying one line (e.g. "Once upon a time, there was a bear who lived in a cave"). Then go around in a circle so that each person contributes a sentence to the story.

5. Place an emphasis on common speech signals

Help your child listen out for important cues by placing an emphasis on common speech signals when you talk. These could include words like 'now', 'next' and 'finally'.

6. Help your child to build their vocabulary

Children can get stuck on a word they don't understand and end up missing the rest of what's being said. Use books, games, flashcards, charts, and online programs like Reading Eggs to build your child's vocabulary, and don't forget to read together regularly.

7. Be a good listener too

Avoid interrupting your child when they are talking and show them that you're listening to what they have to say. Give positive indicators like nodding, smiling, saying supporting words, and following up with questions or elaborating on what they have said to show interest.

8. Remember that most young children have short attention spans

Don't expect your child to process information if it is lengthy, out of context, or not particularly interesting to them. Focus on building learning comprehension skills in a fun and supportive way and remember to always be patient.

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Back to Articles Listening comprehension is more than simply hearing what is being said. It involves: the ability to take in information the ability to respond to instructions the ability to share ideas, thoughts and opinions. Overall, listening comprehension is the ability to understand the meaning of words heard and to then be able to relate to them in some way.

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Listening activity prepared for young learners.
Enjoy it!

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Ejercicio online de Class activities para 2nd. Puedes hacer los ejercicios online o descargar la ficha como pdf.

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Characteristics of Primary Learners I
In the following video, you will discover some essential characteristics which primary learners have it.

Having the aim of the show and explain this characteristic which will be useful to know as teachers. Many times in class We could not know how to manage and solve some problem with students. And this is the key to that.

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TEYL - Characteristics of Young Learners

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Characteristics of Primary Learners II
In the following document, we will find an interesting description of primary learners characteristics. As teachers, we found it useful to know and have some knowledge concerning this characteristic. Talking about different areas which concern the development of students.

Enjoy it!

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Simon says
As we know, young learners need to touch things, do movements with their bodies, etc. So, this video shows us a new way to play the activity "Simon says", where instead of bringing things, students have to do body movements.

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National Geographic Learning: Young Learners

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Using Movement Games with Very Young Learners

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The needs of students
As an educational institution and educational facilitators, it is required and necessary to be aware of the needs of students. Taking this into account different areas, such as social, emotional, psychological or economic. All of the above will also affect the learning process of the students. Thus, the curriculum, a fundamental tool, must be adapted and conceived for each of the students' needs.

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Learner autonomy
This article mentions what is the concept of learner autonomy and how often applies to the process and content of language learning but not specifically to its intended outcome, the development of proficiency in a second or foreign language. Also, this article talks about an understanding of language learner autonomy in which the development of learner autonomy and the growth of target language proficiency are mutually supporting and fully integrated with each other.

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Nowadays we need to be aware of what keeps the attention of students, especially in this new educative modality in which we are not present to said student: Pay attention, please!

In the following image, you will find some useful tips to apply in our classes.

Let's see!

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Is motivation important to teach English?

Nowadays, teachers have to be conscious of the importance of their students' motivation in the learning process as a tool for teachers to improve their lessons.

This article will help you, dear teacher, to know more about motivation and some strategies to increase it in class.

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What to take in an account at the planning moment?

In our daily labour as teachers sometimes we found difficult or tedious to keep or maintain the routine lesson so in the following graphic will show you some tips to make your lessons more enjoyable and effective for our students.

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How students learn
This video is about a lecture, where the ponent talks show a considerable amount of researches that demonstrate that learning takes place when the student's mind actively engages in the material. Also, this lecture includes topics related to psychology, which means the ponent supports their ideas through psychological processes.

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How Students Learn: Strategies for Teaching from the Psychology of Learning

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This article is about the PPP English Teaching Model.
This is a way to teach students English, which has 3 sateges: presentation, practice and production.
To teach English there are different models and this one is a good option, it is easy, simple to understand and have a good structure. (By Karla)

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What is Presentation, practice and production (PPP)?

During your SEE TEFL certification course you will become more familiar with an established methodology for teaching English as a foreign language known as 3Ps or PPP - presentation, practice, production. The PPP method could be characterized as a common-sense approach to teaching as it consists of 3 stages that most people who have learnt how to do anything will be familiar with.

The first stage is the presentation of an aspect of language in a context that students are familiar with, much the same way that a swimming instructor would demonstrate a stroke outside the pool to beginners.

The second stage is practice, where students will be given an activity that gives them plenty of opportunities to practice the new aspect of language and become familiar with it whilst receiving limited and appropriate assistance from the teacher. To continue with the analogy, the swimming instructor allowing the children to rehearse the stroke in the pool whilst being close enough to give any support required and plenty of encouragement.

The final stage is production where the students will use the language in context, in an activity set up by the teacher who will be giving minimal assistance, like the swimming instructor allowing his young charges to take their first few tentative strokes on their own.

Advantages of the PPP (3Ps) Method

As with any well-established methodology, PPP has its critics and a couple of relatively new methodologies are starting to gain in popularity such as TBL (task based learning) and ESA (engage, study, activate). However, even strong advocates of these new methodologies do concede that new EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers find the PPP methodology easiest to grasp, and that these new teachers, once familiar with the PPP methodology, are able to use TBL and ESA more effectively than new trainees that are only exposed to either TBL or ESA.

Indeed, there are strong arguments to suggest that experienced teachers trained in PPP use many aspects of TBL and ESA in their lessons, and that these new methodologies are in truth, the PPP methodology with some minor adjustments.

At this stage you might well be asking, It's all very well having a clear methodology for how to teach but how do I know what to teach? The language that we call English today has absorbed a great many influences over the last thousand years or so. It has resulted in it becoming a language that can provide us with a sparklingly witty pop culture reference from a Tarantino script, 4 simple words spoken by Dr. Martin Luther King that continue to inspire us today, and something as simple and mundane as a road traffic sign.

The Job of the EFL Teacher

As EFL teachers our job is to break down this rich and complex language into manageable chunks for our students. These chunks of language are what EFL teachers call target languageWe are going to look at an example of what a piece of target language might be and then you will be given more detail on how this would be taught in a PPP lesson before finally watching three videos with some key aspects of each stage of the lesson highlighted for you.

During the course we will spend a great deal of time in the training room equipping you with the tools to employ a successful methodology for teaching the English language. You are going to get opportunities to both hone these skills in the training room and put them into practice in authentic classroom settings.

Of course you might be thinking, I don't have any experience of being in a classroom! How on earth am I going to cope with standing at the front of a class with 20 plus pairs of eyes looking at me waiting to see what I do?

All good TEFL courses are designed to train those with no teaching experience whatsoever. We will spend the first part of the course in the training room making you familiar with all the new skills you will need whilst giving you opportunities to practice them in a supported and controlled environment.

Only after that, will you be put in an authentic classroom environment. It goes without saying that the first time anybody stands up and delivers their first lesson will be a nerve-racking experience. However, it is also an experience that mellows over time, and one that all teachers remember fondly as time goes by and they feel more at home in a classroom.

There will be some of you out there with experience of teaching in a classroom already. You may be well versed in employing many different methodologies and strategies in your classroom already, but many or most will have been with native English speaking students, or those with a near-native levels of English. This means that some of the skills we will be equipping you with may feel a little alien at first, but your experience will not prove to be a hindrance. Indeed, you will already have successful classroom management skills that can be adapted to fit a second language classroom fairly easily and other trainees on the course will benefit from your presence.

In addition, some of the skills that you will learn on the course can also be adapted to work in a classroom of native speakers too, and it is not unusual for experienced teachers to comment on exactly this after completing a good TEFL course.

Target Language in an EFL Lesson

Recall how it is the job of the EFL teacher to break down the rich tapestry of the English language into manageable bite-size chunks, suitable for study in an average study period of 50 minutes. As mentioned, we refer to these chunks as target language. As EFL teachers we will select target language that is appropriate for both the skill level and the age of the students.

The target language that you will see being presented in the videos is Likes and dislikes for 6 food items.

The teacher you will watch in the video has a clear aim, which is to ensure that:

**By the end of the lesson, students will know the names of 6 food items in English and will be able to express whether or not they like them in a spoken form by entering into a simple dialogue consisting of,

The six food items are ___. In short, the students will be able to name the 6 food items by the end of the lesson and tell whether they like them or not.**

Presentation - Part 1 of PPP

You may have delivered a few presentations in your time but the type of presentation we deliver in a second language classroom will differ quite a bit from those. For a start, you were speaking to proficient users of the English language about something they were, most likely, vaguely familiar with anyway. In an EFL classroom we don't have those luxuries, so we have to be careful about the language we use and how clearly we present the new language that we wish for our students to acquire.

Let's look at 4 key things that should be occurring in an effective second language classroom presentation:

1 - Attention in the Classroom

Learners are alert, have focused their attention on the new language and are responsive to cues that show them that something new is coming up. A simple way to ensure some of the above is if the teacher makes the target language interesting to the students.

The language will of course, be of more interest to the students if it is put into some type of context that the students are familiar with. In the case of likes and dislikes for young learners a visual associated with a facial expression will be something they can relate to. Naturally, the easier it is for them to relate to the context, the more likely they are to be interested in the language presented.

In the case of the target language for the videos a smiley face visual and a sad face visual on the whiteboard linked to the phrases I like ___. and I don't like ___., respectively. A teacher might make exaggerated facial expressions whilst presenting these ideas to make the ideas both fun and easy to perceive for the students. This is often referred to as contextualization in EFL classrooms.

2 - Perception and Grading of Language

We want to ensure that the learners both see and hear the target language easily. So if a whiteboard is being used, it should be well organized with different colors being used to differentiate between different ideas. If images are being used, there should be no ambiguity as to what they represent and sounds made by the teacher should not only be clear, but should be repeated and the teacher needs to check the material has been perceived correctly, and can do this by asking the students to repeat the sounds he or she is making.

Learners will be bombarded with a series of images corresponding to sounds made by the teacher during the presentation stage and it is the teacher's responsibility to ensure that they are not overloaded with information and that clear links are being made between the images and the associated sounds.

Therefore, there is an onus on the teacher not to use any unnecessary language at this stage. That is to say the grading of their language should be appropriate for the level of their students and the language they use should consist of the target language and any other essential language required to present the ideas clearly such as commands like listen! The commands should, whenever possible, be supported by clear body language.

3 - Target Language Understanding

The learners must be able to understand the meaning of the material. So in the case of likes and dislikes they perhaps need to see an image of a happy face and associate it with liking something and a sad face and associate that with disliking something.

We also need to have a way of checking if the learners did indeed, understand the material presented without asking the question, Do you understand? as this invariably triggers the response yes! from learners who are keen to please their teacher and not to lose face. We, as teachers, need to be a little more imaginative in checking our student's understanding of material presented. Ideally, we should be checking the learners' understanding in context. In the videos you will see, expect to see the teacher doing this during the presentation stage.

4 - Short-term Memory in the Classroom

The learners will have to retain the information from the presentation and use it further on in the lesson when we have consolidated their learning of the material and we will give them an opportunity to produce it on their own.

For the target language to be retained by the learners, it needs to be engaging and we need to consider that different learners will remember the material in different ways. Some by the way the material is seen, others by the way it is heard, and others if it is associated with a physical movement perhaps. We need to make sure our presentation has something to enable all these types of learners to retain the information.

Presentation Stage of a PPP EFL Lesson with subtitles

Practice - Part 2 of PPP

Practice can roughly be defined as the rehearsal of certain behaviors with the objective of consolidating learning and improving performance. Below are some of the characteristics of an effective language practice:

1 - Practice Validity

The practice activity must have learners rehearsing the skill or material it purports to practice. So in the case of the lesson you will view shortly, it must have the learners practicing both the food vocabulary items and the structure of the dialogue, i.e.,

2 - Pre-learning

Before we ask our learners to practice new language, we must have ensured that they have some understanding of the new language. We will have done this during the presentation stage. If they have not had the new language clearly presented to them and been aided in being given some understanding of it, then they (the learners) will not be practicing at this stage but will be going through another initial learning stage. Worse still, they will feel like they are being tested on something they haven't been allowed to gain an understanding of.

3 - Volume (Amount) of Practice

Here, we are referring to the number of opportunities every student in the class has to practice the new language and not the level of sound. The more opportunities each student has to practice the target language, the more effective this stage of the lesson is.

So in the case of likes and dislikes, we might give the students individual worksheets where they have to fill in some part of the dialogue and the name of a food.

4 - Success Orientation

The students should have an opportunity to practice the new language and in order for this to happen they need an activity that both stretches them and is a task they can complete because of course, if it wasn't, they wouldn't be getting any opportunity to practice.

5 - Issuing Activity Instructions and Managing the Activity

Of course, whilst it is important to select an appropriate activity, it is equally important to issue clear and unambiguous instructions for the activity itself so all of your students are clear as to what is expected of them. We will be issuing instructions for the activity in the student's second language so we need to make use of clear visuals to support any language we have to use and strong demonstrations of what is expected.

Managing the activity should consist of the teacher being mobile during the activity, offering praise and being on hand to show struggling students where relevant information may be found on the whiteboard.

Practice Stage of PPP EFL Lesson with subtitles

Production - Part 3 of PPP

The students have now had the target language presented to them clearly and have had an opportunity to practice it in a controlled environment. If we return to the swimming instructor analogy, it is now time to let them take their first few tentative strokes in the pool on their own with supervision and encouragement from the instructor.

As with the practice stage, we have to initiate an activity that allows them opportunities to use the target language in the classroom. In fact, the characteristics of a production stage activity are quite similar to the practice stage with one key difference and that is, student autonomy.

During this stage, the students will be producing the target language with minimal assistance from the teacher as opposed to the practice stage where the teacher will be on hand to assist students rehearse target language that has only just been presented to them.

Here are some of the key aspects of a production stage activity:

1 - Volume (Amount) of Production

As with practice, we want to create as many opportunities for our students to produce the target language albeit this time, more independently. This means we avoid activities where the students speak to the teacher as this allows limited opportunities (the students have to wait their turn before they get a chance to speak to the teacher). Instead for spoken activities, we look to get the students speaking in pairs, speaking to each other as much as possible, whilst we as the teachers go around the classroom offering minimal assistance but lots of positive reinforcement.

2 - Production Validity

Again, we should initiate an activity that allows the students to produce the target language that we presented to them and not a variation on it (although this is not strictly true with higher level students).

So, in the case of likes and dislikes for food, we should set up an activity where the students are saying, Do you like pineapple? as opposed to, What do you think of pineapples?

3 - Production Contextualization

The activity should simulate a real-life situation where they (the students) may use the target language. In the case of likes and dislikes for food this might be a menu with images of the food items or perhaps a series of images of the food items to prompt the dialogue,

Note that a successful production activity will also have aspects that set it apart from a practice activity, including:

4 - Student Autonomy

Students will be speaking, using the target language, with ideally, little or no support from the teacher.

They shouldn't be looking things up on either the whiteboard or on any materials they have on their desk (e.g. a completed practice worksheet) so a teacher may choose to erase information from the whiteboard for this stage and the teacher might also choose to get students to clear their desks.

5 - Issuing Instructions for an Activity

As with the practice stage whilst it is important to select an appropriate activity, it is equally important to issue clear and unambiguous instructions for the activity itself so all of our students are clear as to what is expected of them. We will be issuing instructions for the activity in the student's second language so we need to make use of clear visuals to support any language we have to use and strong demonstrations of what is expected, just as we will have done during the practice stage.

6 - Correcting Errors During the Activity

It is important that the students get as many opportunities to speak using the newly acquired language. Therefore, a teacher shouldn't be drowning them out by speaking at length, over the top of them to correct any errors. This obviously differs from the practice where students expect the teacher to assist them as they rehearse (not produce) newly acquired language.

Clever use of body language by the teacher will enable them to be discrete in correcting errors and will allow them to offer much needed encouragement to students as well.

Production Stage of a PPP EFL Lesson with subtitles

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What is PPP Teaching Method? How to Create ESL Lesson Plan - SEE TEFL

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Learn more about PPP English Method, one of the best approaches and methodology for teaching English to EFL students of all ages.

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Teaching Grammar with Board Races - TEFL ESL

This video is about a class where the topic is the comparatives, in this case, the teacher introduces an activity, board races. This activity implies that two groups of students have to race for completing the adjectives with an "er" as long as if necessary. The group that gets completing the whole board rightly, will win.

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Bridge Education Group TEFL TESOL Certifications

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TEFL LIKE A PRO: Teaching English Grammar with Board Races - TEFL ESL

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Let's improve our pronunciation!

A huge part of learning English is the correct pronunciation, so this video will help us to improve it. And notice an increase in our knowledge about the correct pronunciation of some vowel or consonants.

Always remember to practice your pronunciation to see great development.

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Teaching vocabulary
This short article talks to us about what aspects of the students we have that consider, or aspects that allow us to teach vocabulary adequately. For instance: phonics, number of words that need to be learned according to the age, etc

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During the past 10 years, Jeanne Chall [see A Tribute to Jeanne Chall, in this issue] encouraged me to focus on the study of vocabulary and how vocabulary growth might be encouraged. Both of us had come to the conclusion that vocabulary growth was inadequately addressed in current educational curricula, especially in the elementary and preschool years and that more teacher-centered and planned curricula were needed, just as had been the case with phonics. Jeanne had come to this conclusion through her work on the stages of reading development (Chall, 1983/1996), her work on textbook difficulty (Chall and Conard, 1991), and especially through the findings of her joint research project with Catherine Snow on families and literacy (Chall, Snow, et al., 1982), as summarized in (Chall, Jacobs, and Baldwin, 1990). In this book, Chall and her colleagues traced the relative decline in reading achievements experienced by working-class children who had become competent readers by third grade but whose vocabulary limitations increasingly had a negative effect on their reading comprehension as they advanced to seventh grade. (Jeanne mentioned to me several times her disappointment that The Reading Crisis was not more widely discussed.)

I had been particularly influenced by Wesley Becker's famous Harvard Educational Review article (1977) noting that the impact of early DISTAR success with decoding was muted for reading comprehension in later elementary grades by vocabulary limitations. Becker argued that this was a matter of experience rather than general intelligence by observing that while his DISTAR students' reading comprehension fell relative to more advantaged students by grade 4, their mathematics performance remained high. He suggested that the difference was that all the knowledge that is needed for math achievement is taught in school, whereas the vocabulary growth needed for successful reading comprehension is essentially left to the home. Disadvantaged homes provide little support for vocabulary growth, as recently documented by Hart and Risley (1995). I was further influenced by the finding of my doctoral student, Maria Cantalini (1987), that school instruction in kindergarten and grade 1 apparently had no impact on vocabulary development as assessed by the Peabody vocabulary test. Morrison, Williams, and Massetti (1998) have since replicated this finding. This finding is particularly significant in view of Cunningham and Stanovich's (1997) recently reported finding that vocabulary as assessed in grade 1 predicts more than 30 percent of grade 11 reading comprehension, much more than reading mechanics as assessed in grade 1 do. Finally, I have been influenced by the consistent finding in the oral reading miscue literature that when overall error rates reach 5 percent of running words (tokens), that "contextual" errors (those that make sense in context) virtually disappear. I infer from this that when readers (or listeners?) understand less than 95 percent of the words in a text, they are likely to lose the meaning of that text (and be especially unlikely to infer meanings of unfamiliar words).

In short, as Gough and Tunmer (1986) have pointed out, vocabulary development is both important and ignored. Can we-educators-do better, or are we simply bumping into constitutional limitations that are beyond the power of schools to affect? In the remainder of this article, I am going to summarize a few points that support the argument for an increased emphasis on vocabulary and suggest the need for a more teacher-centered and curriculum-structured approach to ensure adequate vocabulary development.

The consequences of an increased emphasis on phonics. In recent years, we have seen a tremendous emphasis on the importance of phonics instruction to ensure educational progress. We also have seen that while more children learn to "read" with increased phonics instruction, there have not been commensurate gains in reading comprehension (e.g., Gregory, Earl, and O'Donoghue, 1993; Madden et al., 1993; Pinnell et al., 1994). What is missing for many children who master phonics but don't comprehend well is vocabulary, the words they need to know in order to understand what they're reading. Thus vocabulary is the "missing link" in reading/language instruction in our school system. Because vocabulary deficits particularly affect less advantaged and second-language children, I will be arguing that such "deficits" are fundamentally more remediable than many other school learning problems.

Schools now do little to promote vocabulary development, particularly in the critical years before grade 3. The role of schooling in vocabulary acquisition has been the subject of much debate. Early (pre-literacy) differences in vocabulary growth are associated with social class (Duncan, Brooks-Gunn, and Klebanov, 1994; Hart and Risley, 1995; McLloyd, 1998). Nagy and Herman (1987) and Sternberg (1987) argue that much vocabulary acquisition results from literacy and wide reading rather than from direct instruction. However, it is obvious that a great deal of vocabulary acquisition occurs before children become literate, and before they are reading books that introduce unfamiliar vocabulary (Becker, 1977). Cantalini (1987) and Morrison, Williams, and Massetti (1998) both report that vocabulary acquisition in kindergarten and grade 1 is little influenced by school experience, based on finding that young first-graders have about the same vocabulary (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) as older kindergarten children. Cantalini reported the same result for second grade.

The relatively small number of words that need to be learned. It is sometimes argued that the number of words children need to learn is so great that this can only happen incidentally through wide reading (Anderson, 1996; Nagy and Herman, 1987; Sternberg, 1987). This argument is quite reminiscent of the argument that the spelling-to-sound structure of English is so difficult that it can't be taught but only learned through experience. In both cases, the complexity of what needs to be learned has been somewhat exaggerated. Many years ago, Lorge and Chall (1963) argued that traditional dictionary sampling methods for assessing vocabulary had greatly overestimated the volume of vocabulary children needed to acquire. As Lorge and Chall, Beck and McKeown (1990), and others have noted, we need to focus on root word growth rather than the acquisition of all inflected and derived forms of words. Jeremy Anglin's (1993) monograph suggests that children acquire about 1,200 root words a year during the elementary years with perhaps half that many root words learned per year prior to grade 1. (He also argues that perhaps twice that many words need to be learned, particularly including idiomatic forms.) My own research (Biemiller and Slonim, in press) suggests that the average number of root word meanings acquired per year may be somewhat smaller, more like 600 root word meanings a year from infancy to the end of elementary school. This conclusion, based on root word meanings sampled from Dale and O'Rourke's Living Word Vocabulary (1981), is partly based on the observation that many similar meanings are acquired at about the same age and probably do not require separate instruction.

Evidence that vocabulary differences present by grade 2 may account for most vocabulary differences in elementary school. There has been relatively little discussion or examination of individual differences in vocabulary growth. Hart and Risley (1995) observed large differences associated with word learning opportunities in the preschool years. In our current research, Naomi Slonim and I are finding that large vocabulary differences are present by the end of grade 2-amounting to more than 3,000 root words between high and low quartiles in a normative population (Biemiller and Slonim, in press). After grade 2, cross-sectional data indicate that the lowest-quartile children may actually add root word vocabulary faster than the higher-quartile children. However, by grade 5, they have only reached the median for grade 2 children. Thus, if we could find ways of supporting more rapid vocabulary growth in the early years, more children would be able to comprehend "grade level" texts in the upper elementary grades. (Note that the "reading grade level" of texts is in fact almost entirely determined by the vocabulary load of those texts (Chall and Conard, 1991; Chall and Dale, 1995). Thus early vocabulary limitations make "catching up" difficult even though once in school, children appear to acquire new vocabulary at similar rates. To "catch up," vocabulary-disadvantaged children have to acquire vocabulary at above-average rates.

The sequential nature of vocabulary acquisition. Much evidence clearly indicates that vocabulary is acquired in largely the same order by most children. The existence of empirical vocabulary norms (as in the Peabody and Living Word Vocabulary) indicate that some words are acquired later than others. Slonim and I have found very high correlations (mostly over .90) between mean scores for words obtained from different grades (Biemiller and Slonim, in press). We also found that when data is ordered by children's vocabulary levels rather than their grade level, we can clearly identify a range of words known well (above 75 percent), words being acquired (74 percent-25 percent) and those little known. Furthermore, these ranges are sequential. At any given point in vocabulary acquisition, a preliminary conclusion from this work is that there are about 2,000-3,000 root words that a child is likely to be learning. This makes the construction of a "vocabulary curriculum" plausible.

Defining an essential vocabulary for high school graduates. A corollary of the sequential nature of vocabulary acquisition is the possibility of defining a common vocabulary needed by most high school graduates. Several studies have shown that college entrants need 11,000 to 14,000 root words, while college graduates typically have about 17,000 root words (D'Anna, Zechmeister, and Hall 1991; Goulden, Nation, and Read, 1990; Hazenberg and Hulstijn, 1996). We need further research on the degree to which we can identify these words. (It is clear that all do not know the same exact words. It is equally clear that there is a substantial common vocabulary plus a further more discipline-specific vocabulary.)

The hypothesis that most root word and idiomatic vocabulary learned before and during elementary school results from direct explanation of words. We know relatively little about the processes by which children add words to their vocabularies. Some of the data are negative-evidence that children do not easily acquire words by inference, especially children younger than age 10 (Robbins and Ehri, 1994; Werner and Kaplan, 1952). In Bus, Van Ijzendoom, and Pellegrini's (1995) summary of the effects of reading to children, there is evidence that younger children profit less from simply being "read to." There is also positive evidence that children do readily acquire vocabulary when provided with a little explanation as novel words are encountered in context (Beck, Perfetti, and McKeown, 1982; Elley, 1989; Feitelson et al., 1986; Feitelson et al., 1991; Whitehurst et al., 1998). Preliminary evidence from directly interviewing children about word acquisition suggests that as late as grade 5, about 80 percent of words are learned as a result of direct explanation, either as a result of the child's request or instruction, usually by a teacher (Biemiller, 1999b). Overall, I believe that before age 10, the evidence supports the conclusion that a substantial majority of new root words are acquired through explanation by others (including explanations in texts) rather than by inference while reading, as has often been argued by Anderson, Nagy and Herman, and by Sternberg. For practical purposes, we should be prepared to ensure the availability and use of explanations of word meanings throughout at least the elementary school years.

Although children differ in their opportunities to learn words and the ease with which they learn words, evidence suggests that most can learn vocabulary at normal rates. There is clear evidence that vocabulary is associated with socioeconomic status-presumably reflecting differences in opportunity (as documented by Hart and Risley, 1995; and Snow, Burns, and Griffin, 1998). There is also clear evidence relating vocabulary development to various phonological skills or capacities (e.g., Gathercole et al., 1997). It is likely that environment and "capacity" interact-that constitutionally more-advantaged children also may be environmentally more advantaged. However, a number of studies summarized in Biemiller (1999a), Stahl (1999), and elsewhere clearly indicate that children can acquire and retain two or three words a day through instruction involving contextualized introduction and explanation of new words. Furthermore, while less verbally fluent or lower vocabulary children and adolescents have been found to benefit little from inferring word meanings (Cain and Oakhill, in preparation; Elshout-Mohr and van Daalen-Kapteijns, 1987), more-direct approaches have been reported to work well with these children (see Elley, Feitelson, and Whitehurst references cited previously). Overall, I hypothesize that most children (90 percent plus) can acquire new vocabulary at rates necessary to reach "grade level" or near grade level vocabulary in middle elementary school, if given adequate opportunity to use new words and adequate instruction in word meanings.

The need for planned introduction and explanation of vocabulary plus various tools to help children become more independent in dealing with new vocabulary. I have suggested above the hypothesis that 80 percent or more of the root words learned by grade 6 are learned as a result of direct explanation by parents, peers, teachers, and texts. Those who learn more words almost undoubtedly encounter more words and receive more explanations of word meanings. This suggests that we could do considerably more than we now do to ensure the development of adequate vocabulary through systematic exposure to two to three new words a day combined with adequate explanation of these words and opportunities to use them. (I am referring to new meanings not simply words that are unfamiliar in print.) Present school practices fall far short of this objective in the primary grades. (Schools may do better in the upper elementary grades.) Other types of vocabulary instruction (e.g., using affixes, word family approaches, and direct instruction in inferencing) will also be useful, especially in grades 3 and above.

This particular objective raises the possibility of returning to a more basal approach, at least as one component of classroom language and reading instruction. If vocabulary acquisition is largely sequential in nature, it would appear possible to identify that sequence and to ensure that children at a given vocabulary level have an opportunity to encounter words they are likely to be learning next, within a context that uses the majority of the words that they have already learned. Some researchers are already beginning to work on this objective (e.g., David Francis and Barbara Foorman in Texas, Jan Hulstijn in the Netherlands, Margaret McKeown and Isabel Beck in Pittsburgh, William Nagy in Seattle, and John Morgan and myself in Toronto). Many problems need to be solved. Existing lists of words (e.g., Living Word Vocabulary) do not correspond closely enough to observed sequences of word acquisition to be great guides (although they are better than nothing). Word frequency in print data (e.g., Carroll, Davies, and Richmond, 1971) bears relatively little relationship to observed word knowledge. (In my studies, Carroll's SFI index accounted for 7 percent of observed root word knowledge. In contrast, Living Word Vocabulary levels accounted for more than 50 percent of our data.) William Nagy (personal communication) has proposed combining Dale and O'Rourke's data with expert ratings-a very plausible suggestion.

Given the establishment of plausible vocabulary lists, teachers could relate these lists to vocabulary being introduced in books (short stories, novels, texts) being studied, be aware of words to introduce or explain (or to query children about if they don't ask!), and be aware of some important words that aren't going to be covered in the established curriculum. These words could be taught directly, or other materials (e.g., stories to be read to class) could be introduced that include them.

Conclusion: A substantially greater teacher-centered effort is needed to promote vocabulary development, especially in the kindergarten and early primary years. In her last book, The Academic Achievement Challenge, Jeanne Chall (2000) presented a summary of research supporting the effectiveness of "teacher centered" approaches to education. The information reviewed here similarly points to the need for more planned (but contextualized) introduction of vocabulary. This is especially true in the pre-reading years (before grades 3 or 4 when children begin to read books that are likely to introduce new vocabulary). Specifically, increased teacher-centered vocabulary work should include the deliberate introduction of a wider range of vocabulary in the early primary years through oral sources (most children are limited in what they can read at this age level), ensuring coverage of about 4,000 root words by the end of grade 2. In the later elementary years, continued development will include adding another 500 to 750 root words per year, additional idioms, and increased fluency in using derived words. In addition, in the upper elementary grades, instruction is needed in deriving word meanings from affixes, word families, etc., as well as in ways of inferring word meanings. If we are serious about "increasing standards" and bringing a greater proportion of schoolchildren to high levels of academic accomplishment, we cannot continue to leave vocabulary development to parents, chance, and highly motivated reading.

Thus, I strongly recommend a more teacher-directed and curriculum-directed approach to fostering vocabulary and language growth. If education is going to have a serious "compensatory" function, we must do more to promote vocabulary. Our current data show large "environmental" effects in kindergarten to grade 2. Large differences remain by grade 5 (e.g., children in the lowest grade 5 quartile have vocabularies similar to median second-grade children). Is this simply the product of "intelligence"? I believe it is in considerable part the result of different learning opportunities. After grade 2, vocabulary growth rates look similar or faster for "low quartile" children. If we could keep them from being so far behind by grade 2, they apparently wouldn't be so far behind in grade 5!

I don't believe we can make all kids alike. But I think we could do more to give them similar tools to start with. Some kids may have to work harder to add vocabulary. Educators may have to work harder with some kids. So what's new? But now, educators do virtually nothing before grade 3 or 4 to facilitate real vocabulary growth. By then, it's too late for many children.

Andrew Biemiller is professor, Institute of Child Study, Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, University of Toronto, Ontario. His latest book is Language and Reading Success (Brookline Books, Cambridge, Mass.) This article is reprinted with permission from the International Dyslexia Association quarterly newsletter, Perspectives, Fall 2000, Vol. 26, No. 4.

References

Anderson, R. C. (1996). Research foundations to support wide reading. In V. Greanery (Ed.), Promoting reading in developing countries. New York, N.Y.: International Reading Association.

Anglin, J. M. (1993). Vocabulary development: A morphological analysis. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Serial No. 238, 58.

Beck, I., and McKeown, M. (1990). Conditions of vocabulary acquisition. In R. Barr, M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, and P. D. Pearson, (Eds.) Handbook of Reading Research, Vol. 2, (789-814). New York, N.Y.: Longman.

Beck, I. L., Perfetti, C., and McKeown, M. G. (1982). Effects of long-term vocabulary instruction on lexical access and reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 74, 506-521.

Becker, W. C. (1977). Teaching reading and language to the disadvantaged: What we have learned from field research. Harvard Educational Review, 47, 518-543.

Biemiller, A. (1998, April). Oral vocabulary, word identification, and reading comprehension in English second language and English first language elementary school children. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, San Diego.

Biemiller, A. (1999a). Language and reading success. Cambridge, Mass.: Brookline Books.

Biemiller, A. (1999b). Estimating vocabulary growth for ESL children with and without listening comprehension instruction. Paper presented at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, Quebec.

Biemiller, A., and Slonim, N. (in press). Estimating root word vocabulary growth in normative and advantaged populations: Evidence for a common sequence of vocabulary acquisition. Journal of Educational Psychology, Fall 2001.

Cain, K., and Oakhill, J. (In preparation). Reading comprehension and the ability to learn new vocabulary items from context.

Cantalini, M. (1987). The effects of age and gender on school readiness and school success. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Toronto, Ontario.

Carroll, J. B., Davies, P., and Richmond, B. (1971). The American Heritage word frequency book. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Chall, J. S. (1983/1996). Stages of reading development. (2nd edition). New York, N.Y.: Harcourt Brace.

Chall, J. S. (2000). The academic achievement challenge: What really works in the classroom? New York, N.Y.: Guilford.

Chall, J. S., and Conard, S. S. (1991). Should textbooks challenge students? New York, N.Y.: Teachers College Press.

Chall, J. S., and Dale, E. (1995). Readability revisited: The new Dale-Chall readability formula. Cambridge, Mass.: Brookline Books.

Chall, J. S., Jacobs, V. A., and Baldwin, L. E. (1990). The reading crisis: Why poor children fall behind. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Chall, J. S., Snow, C., Barnes, W. S., Chandler, J., Goodman, I. F., Hemphill, L. and Jacobs, V. (1982). Families and literacy: The contribution of out-of-school experiences to children's acquisition of literacy. Final report to the National Institute of Education, Dec. 22, 1982. ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. Ed 234 345.

Cunningham, A. E., and Stanovich, K. E. (1997). Early reading acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later. Developmental Psychology, 33, 934-945.

D'Anna, C. A., Zechmeister, E. B., and Hall, J. W. (1991). Toward a meaningful definition of vocabulary size. Journal of Reading Behavior, 23(1), 109-122.

Dale, E., and O'Rourke, J. (1981). The living word vocabulary. Chicago: World Book/Childcraft International.

Duncan, G., Brooks-Gunn, J., and Klebanov, P. (1994). Economic deprivation and early childhood development. Child Development, 65, 296-318.

Elley, W. B. (1989). Vocabulary acquisition from listening to stories. Reading Research Quarterly, 24, 174-186.

Elshout-Mohr, M., and van Daalen-Kapteijns, M. M. (1987). Cognitive processes in learning word meanings. In M. G. McKeown and M. E. Curtis (Eds.), The nature of vocabulary acquisition (53-72). Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Feitelson, D., Goldstein, Z., Iraqi, J., and Share, D. I. (1991). Effects of listening to story reading on aspects of literacy acquisition in a diglossic situation. Reading Research Quarterly, 28, 70-79.

Feitelson, D., Kita, B., and Goldstein, Z. (1986). Effects of listening to series stories on first-graders' comprehension and use of language. Research in the Teaching of English, 20, 339-356.

Gathercole, S. E., Hitch, G. J., Service, E., and Martin, A. J. (1997). Phonological short-term memory and new word learning in children. Developmental Psychology, 33, 966-979.

Gough, P. B., and Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7, 6-10.

Goulden, R., Nation, P., and Read, J. (1990). How large can a receptive vocabulary be? Applied Linguistics, 11(4), 341-363.

Graves, M. F., Juel, C., and Graves, B. (1998). Teaching reading in the 21st century. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Gregory, D., Earl, L., and O'Donoghue, B. (1993). A study of reading recovery in Scarborough: 1990-1992. Publication #92/93-15. Scarborough, Ontario: Scarborough Board of Education.

Hart, B., and Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Baltimore, Md.: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.

Hazenberg, S., and Hulstijn, J. H. (1996). Defining a minimal receptive second-language vocabulary for non-native university students: An empirical investigation. Applied Linguistics, 17(2), 145-163.

Lorge, I., and Chall, J. S. (1963). Estimating the size of vocabularies of children and adults: An analysis of methodological issues. Journal of Experimental Education, 32, 147-157.

Madden, N. A., Slavin, R. E., Karweit, J. L., Dolan L. J., and Wasik, B. A. (1993). Success for all: Longitudinal effects of a restructuring program for inner-city schools. American Educational Research Journal, 30, 123-148.

McLloyd, V. C. (1998). Socioeconomic disadvantage and child development. American Psychologist, 53, 185-204.

Morrison, F. J., Williams, M. A., and Massetti, G. M. (1998, April). The contributions of IQ and schooling to academic achievement. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, San Diego.

Nagy, W. E., and Herman, P. A. (1987). Breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge: Implications for acquisition and instruction. In M. G. McKeown and M. E. Curtis (Eds.), The nature of vocabulary acquisition, (19-36). Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Pinnell, G. S., Lyons, C. A., Deford, D. E., Bryk, A. S., and Seltzer, M. (1994). Comparing instructional models for the literacy education of high-risk first-graders. Reading Research Quarterly, 29, 9-38.

Robbins, C., and Ehri, L. C. (1994). Reading storybooks to kindergartners helps them learn new vocabulary words. Journal of Educational Psychology, 86, 54-64.

Snow, C., Burns, M. S., and Griffin, P. (Eds.), (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Stahl, S.A. (1999). Vocabulary Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Brookline Press.

Sternberg, R. J. (1987). Most vocabulary is learned from context. In M. G. McKeown, and M. E. Curtis (Eds.), The nature of vocabulary acquisition, (89-106). Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Werner, H., and Kaplan, B. (1952). The acquisition of word meanings: A developmental study. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 15, (Serial No. 51, No. 1).

Whitehurst, G. J., Falco, F. L., Lonigan, C., Fischel, J. E., DeBaryshe, B. D., Valdez-Menchaca, M. C., and Caulfield, M. (1988). Accelerating language development through picture book reading. Developmental Psychology, 24, 552-588.

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During the past 10 years, Jeanne Chall [see A Tribute to Jeanne Chall, in this issue] encouraged me to focus on the study of vocabulary and how vocabulary growth might be encouraged.

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Am I planning well? Teacher trainees' voices on lesson planning
This article shows us some teachers' perspectives about if they are planning well or not. So, this article can help us to verify or solve doubts about our lesson plannings or the stage we include in them. Furthermore, we can identify or compare our feelings about planning a lesson with a testimony of a teacher

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Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to explore the first lesson planning experience of the teacher trainees' and identify their reactions. The participants of the study are 150 second year teacher trainees studying at the English Language Teaching (ELT) department at Uludağ University, Turkey. The data is collected by means of examining the lesson plans of the teacher trainees and the analysis of their comments. It is determined that lesson planning experience has a positive impact upon the teacher trainees and it enables them feel like real teachers. However, the results emphasize that when planning, teacher trainees face with problems like formulating objectives and selecting appropriate activities for certain stages. Main challenges include teacher trainees' hesitations about the process, timing difficulties, problems in sequencing and selecting activities, providing effective transitions and finding sources.

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Am I Planning well? Teacher Trainees' Voices on Lesson Planning

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The purpose of the present study is to explore the first lesson planning experience of the teacher trainees' and identify their reactions. The participants of the study are 150 second year teacher trainees studying at the English Language Teaching (ELT) department at Uludağ University, Turkey.

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If you are looking for some sources to teach English, this is a very good option.
BBC has a lot of great ideas to teach English to kids and adults. (By Karla)

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BBC Learning English - BBC Learning English - homepage

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How we can make a lesson more fun?

Exist a huge variety, since games, songs, worksheets, materials or chant.

But why a chant? It proves it that primary learners feel comfortable and secure with repetitive patterns, so chant offers this to students.

Practising or using as an initial activity will give to your student the motivation and confidence which need.

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This year was a great challenge for many, so on the eve of next year, we recommend some tips to improve and strengthen your knowledge of English.
So this article contain more than 20 ways to practice, reinforce and learn the four language skills.

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Writing learning outcomes
This video teaches us how to write learning outcomes in a lesson plan. Even, it shows us what type of verb we have to use for planning a lesson, also this video teaches us what is intended and extended learning outcomes

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This is a good example for a lesson. Teachers can take this video to plan their lesson. (By Karla)

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Lesson 1 - Sam and Mel English for Children

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BLOOM’S TAXONOMY OF EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES
This article explains the concept of Bloom's taxonomy and how we can use the verbs of the hierarchy of cognitive-learning levels to plan a lesson. Even, it shows us how the verbs manifest in the students.

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Why take Bloom's taxonomy into account in our sessions?
Bloom's taxonomy offers us a description and classification of the verbs required in our development to the session.
Let´s check!

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When you start a class it is important to have a warm - up activity. This helps teachers to engage students and it catchs their attention.
Here you have some interesting ideas:

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You'd attract bees with honey rather than vinegar-and the same idea applies to motivating the students in your ESL classroom

One of the toughest tasks a teacher can have on their plate is to motivate their students the right way. This means motivating them from the inside rather than from the outside.

I'll show you several classroom strategies that'll bring out the best in your students and get them excited about learning English.

Contents

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere.Click here to get a copy. (Download)

Smart Tactics for Motivating English Learners

State clear rules and expectations

Start at the beginning of the school year with clear rules. Above all, you need to explain from day one that this is an English class, and English will be the medium of communication.

Have realistic expectations too, depending on the language level of your students. Obviously, different age groups "ring the bell" concerning language or maturity levels. Your students also won't develop their language at the same rate, face the same struggles, or excel in the same areas.

Give plenty of talking time

The more you encourage students to communicate in class, the more motivated they'll be. Here are some ways I've made my class more communicative:

Set up group activities so students have to use the language while working together.

Instead of traditional rows and columns, arrange student desks to make larger tables to encourage communication.

Try the discovery grammar method. Give students a grammar worksheet with the answers already in the blanks before you teach the grammatical concept. Then challenge groups of two or three students to work together to see if they can figure out the rule on their own.

A flipped classroom is another great technique. Assign instructional material to be completed at home and then use class time for extension, practice and deepening activities-in other words, putting language to use through communication.

When all else fails, keep your class communicative by minimizing teacher talk time (TTT). The less you talk, the more your students will be talking.

Know your students' needs and goals

Get to know your students. Analyze their needs and understand their goals and reasons for learning English. Which skills are each student interested in improving, productive ( writing and speaking) and/or receptive ( reading and listening)?

To help find out this information, at the beginning of the term or school year I ask students to fill out a questionnaire. This is where students can describe their language needs, as well as their long-term/short-term English learning goals. You can devise your own questionnaire or use existing materials from the web or your textbooks.

As you go through the class, observe your students' strengths, weaknesses and needs! Just informally gauge where they might be. This can be done through those low-key chats, engaging in games or even by talking with students one on one.

Make your lessons practical

People don't like doing things that are pointless. They want to know that there's a purpose behind what they do, even with simple activities:

Use realia whenever possible. Realia are physical objects, like fruits, maps and pencils. If you're learning about oceans and beaches, have a handful of seashells to share with your students. Even just having a photograph or drawing of new vocabulary words will increase understanding.

Project-based learning is a great way to keep things focused on reality, since it starts with a true-to-life problem and asks students to solve it. Students work through a series of steps to come to a solution, like planning their steps, gathering the necessary information and coming to a conclusion.

Role-playing is another way to stay focused on the practical. Giving students real-life situations they're likely to encounter in the outside world lets them practice for the future in a safe environment.

Use authentic materials

To have interesting lessons, you need to use authentic materials frequently. People love movies, magazines and contemporary music, so invite pop culture into class. One teacher resource, FluentU, even has hundreds of English clips from TV shows, popular vlogs and more, all with learner exercises and interactive subtitles.

Use these materials in class for listening activities, reading activities or to learn new vocabulary. Get yourselves out of the textbook and start reading People magazine. Use a movie as the basis for event sequencing, writing a summary or a cloze listening activity. Pay attention to the music your students like, the types of movies they watch and what they enjoy on TV, then include these materials whenever possible.

Include fun activities

Making class fun is a surefire way to up intrinsic motivation levels. When students are having a good time, they'll be more engaged in learning.

I'll be honest-I love using games with my students. Some of my favorites are Scrabble, Scattergories and Charades. And you don't have to feel tied to the traditional rules, either. There are plenty of ways to change up traditional games to make them even more fun for your ESL students in class.

Another activity would be using social media in class. Try having students write short posts for Facebook, X (Twitter) or Instagram. They can also start a class blog and then write there and respond to comments from their classmates as well as the world at large.

Let students be creative

Being too explicit with instructions usually means there's little creative liberty for students. They might have a fantastic idea, but it has been shut down by all the "dos and do nots."

Give your students room to explore. Just as explicit directions lead to stifled creativity, an open-ended approach provides the opportunity for massive creativity. You can ask your students to create a written essay, video, blog post, photo essay with captions or something entirely different that brings out their creative side.

If there truly is a very specific way things must be done, explain it in the simplest terms that you can. Providing a visual example might be more beneficial, though be careful that your example doesn't end up being the standard.

Make your classroom a safe space

One of the best ways to shut down an ESL student is to put them on the spot. Asking a student to respond or speak on demand, especially solo, can create some major anxiety.

Providing relaxed situations for students to try out English will really allow them to open up. Starting off with classroom or small group conversations doesn't put anyone on the spot. If a student feels like they can communicate at their own speed, they'll be more likely to eventually participate in the conversation.

Warm and positive tones, smiles and open body language will also put your students at ease.

Connect with your students

Your students will likely be more motivated to learn if they know that you care. That's why forging relationships with your students is so important.

Let your students know that you care about them and where they come from by encouraging expressions of culture in class. Be on the lookout for any opportunities to have students share their values, beliefs and traditions.

Also, take some time every day to relate to your students on a personal level. Ask them how their weekends went. Encourage them if they seem down. Let them know that you're there for them in any way.

Don't correct every mistake

It's important to give positive feedback, like compliments and encouragement, as well as criticism.

But please, please don't correct every little thing. Ask yourself two questions: Is it causing a major breakdown in communication? If not, maybe just let it go. Will this embarrass the student? If so, definitely let it go.

If you must correct, it's best to do it in a natural and positive way.

For example, your student makes the following statement when speaking about his father: "She liking ice cream pink." Instead of pointing out each of the errors in the sentence, it would be more beneficial to say "Cool-he likes pink ice cream. Me too!" Your student will pick up on that.

Next time they might not make the same error-or they might. The important thing is, they tried again.

Celebrate hard work and achievements

It's great to celebrate achievements on a regular basis. This means taking the time to talk about the things your students have accomplished and giving them the space to brag a little. Go around in a circle and have everyone share something they believe they did well. Have their peers give them a round of applause, compliments or "snaps" to celebrate!

You can also praise students for their process and effort. If a student studies all night for a test then gets 60%, you can say, "You must have studied really hard, I bet if you study that hard next time you will do even better!" The student will know that if they study hard they'll be praised (and they're still aware that there's room for improvement). This can reap rewards in the classroom environment.

Scholarly research into effective praise goes much deeper into the subject, and the BSP model of praise ( Behavior-specific, Student-specific, P ositive praise) is very popular in educational discourse.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation for Learning English

Motivation can be categorized into two types: intrinsic and extrinsic.

Intrinsic motivation is simply the motivation to do something because it's personally rewarding. For example, you might play a sport because you enjoy it, or you might complete a puzzle because you find the challenge interesting. This would be intrinsic motivation, and this is the holy grail of learning.

The opposite is extrinsic motivation. This is when external factors are required to motivate you towards doing something. Examples are competing in a sport to win a trophy, or being paid to complete a task. This is extrinsic motivation, and it's best used to complement your students' intrinsic motivations.

One thing that you should notice straight away is that almost everything we use as teachers is extrinsic. Praise, rewards, stickers, candy, wanting to make parents proud, awards: all extrinsic motivation.

But to motivate students to learn English, you need to bring out their intrinsic motivation, whether through games, creative projects or lessons that are tied to their goals. You should also provide a supportive environment for them to boost their confidence and help them see the real-world applications of what they're learning

Extrinsic motivation can be a very useful tool, especially to encourage students to do something they have absolutely no interest in whatsoever. The focus, however, should be on using the students' intrinsic motivations-their real motivations-to help them to learn.

Motivating students is a part of every teacher's job.

And while honey and vinegar may be great in the kitchen, the best kind of motivation comes from within your students themselves.

By encouraging intrinsic motivation in your students, you'll be setting them up for success even after they leave your classrooms!

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere.Click here to get a copy. (Download)

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How to Motivate Students to Learn English: Top 15 Classroom Strategies | FluentU English Educator.Blog

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Motivate students to learn English with these 15 tried-and-tested strategies that you can implement in an ESL class! Harness their intrinsic motivation by tying your class to their interests, providing a supportive environment and stimulating them with fun activities, authentic materials and creative projects.

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If you are looking for a good song to teach present continues, this one is one of the best options.
Lemon tree has a lot of specific grammar (present continues).

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GRAMMAR?
Sometimes it could be hard to teach, but you just need some creativity and it will be easier.
To teach grammar it is important to be aware of the students' age and their differences.
BY: KARLA GOMEZ

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The grammar juggernaut continues to roll on despite many of the criticisms of an overly grammar-oriented focus that we've discussed previously on this blog.
In spite of our criticisms, one of the confusing things to make clear is that we don't discourage teachers from teaching grammar entirely. Even though students may to an extent (especially in Hong Kong!) judge a teacher by how effective they think their grammar lessons are (or even how closely their teacher's grammar lessons conform to the students' expectations of what a grammar lesson should be), grammar does play an important role in language learning - especially in the early stages of the process where a new language can seem very contradictory, lacking structure and rules and disorganized. In this situation, your "pattern-hungry brain" strives to make order from the chaos - and this is where grammar teaching comes into its own.

However, it is important to keep the needs and interests of your learners at heart: children learn very differently and process information (especially languages) in a very different way to adults - and so your grammar lessons ought to reflect this.

How is it different to teaching adults?

In many ways, the main ones we focus on here are motivation, processing language, analysis of "form" and the types of tasks that are useful.

Young learners have different motivations to learn

In the most basic sense, younger learners differ from adults in the reason they learn. Typically, but not always, adult are choosing to be in your lesson. There are of course exceptions to this: the learner who needs to pass an exam (the exam is more motivating than being in your class), or the student whose boss tells them that English study is a contractual obligation. However as a generalization, we might say that adults tend to be intrinsically motivated.

Whereas younger learners typically study English because it's on their school curriculum or because their parents make them. I'm yet to meet a young learner to enrolled in an English course because that's how they wanted to spend their Saturday mornings.

Young learners process language differently

We know from observations of children, whose brains and language processing centres continue to develop until into early adulthood, process language differently. Part of this is related to cognitive development: we know that a classroom activity based around the possible merits and disadvantages of building a casino next to a primary school isn't going to generate much discussion with a group of 7 year old learners (they have a limited ability to engage in abstract thought and logical reasoning). It's also partly to do with language development too. Children learn their first language by identifying the most relevant content words in the context of their own experience. Mum, dada, outside.....these are often the most common words babies learn first. We also know that just before children reach puberty, they go through a lexical explosion as the brain shifts gears, preparing it for adulthood. Children, especially young children, are repetitive learners - repetition in context is the keystone to making progress.

This suggests that children engage with language, and learn it best when it is meaningful and relevant, there are plenty of examples and opportunities to practice, the meaning of the message is the primary focus of any form of communication, and that lexical complexity (and our expectations of this) should be graded loosely on the basis of age.

In this sense, we say that communication in young learner classrooms needs to be meaning driven, in that the priority needs to be communication and negotiation of the message, and the anlaysis of the form and grammar comes secondary to this. This can be a challenge, especially in classrooms where declarative knowledge (e.g. This is the present perfect, or the noun form of procedural is procedure) tends to predominate traditional teaching approaches.

Young learners enjoy very different types of tasks

So how does this effect the types of tasks we choose for our young learners? Well, as a generalization we might say that activities should:

Be meaning driven, with a secondary focus on form

We reinforce a focus on grammar forms by maximizing repetition

Tasks should be age appropriate

Tasks should reflect what our learners might need to do/say/use in their daily lives

That the tasks are enjoyable and challenging, relative to cognitive development of the learners

Ultimately, you need to remember that what works for adults won't always work with kids. This means that the traditional practice tasks that you might have used to great success might have limited application for your young learners. This includes: controlled practice gap-fills, Mill drill type tasks (e.g. Have you been to Australia? Yes, I have. Have you eaten pasta in Italy? No, I haven't. Have you seen the hickey on Mr. Johnson's neck? No, I haven't.) and long-winded, meta-language laden teacher presentations (SNORE!)

So here are a few ideas of tasks that work best with young learners....

Use chants and rhymes

Chants and rhymes are a ubiquitous feature of young childhood - If I were to ask you to finish the following sentences, I bet 99% of you could.....so here's a test:
- Ring-a-ring a rosie.....
- Hickory dickory dock....

- Frere Jacques....frere Jacques....

Why do these stick with you well beyond your childhood years? Because they are repetitive. Repetition is one of the key elements we discussed earlier: it's one way that the developing brain cements neural processes and pathways and reinforces them as "useful" and necessary to preserve.

How does this apply to grammar lessons with young learners? Well, next time you want to introduce you learners to a particulary structure, try turning it into a chant....does this sound like something you already do when you "drill" target language? Well it should. The key difference here is that you can add rhythm to it to make it catchier and a little bit "stickier" like a nursery rhyme.
For example, I wanted my students to design a poster where they reinvented uses for common objects. So, to introduce the phrases to this, I sat everyone in a circle, and put my hand in a bag containing
some of the objects, and described it to the students:

You can use it for cooking, it's made of metal.

You can use to for phone calls, it's made of plastic.

It helps you to study, it's made of paper.

Notice that all of these phrases follow the same basic stress pattern. Look at the following rhythms that match the phrases above (small dots = weak syllable, O = stressed syllable):

. . O . . O . (de de DA de de DA de) = you can use it for cooking

. . O . . O . (de de DA de de DA de) = you use it for phone calls

. O . . O . (de DA de de DA de) = It helps you to study

Now try saying the rhythm repetitively...see if you can get into a bit of a groove with is, and then add your own example to teach your students.

Note that this is also a really good way to introduce and reinforce classroom language like "can I borrow a pen", "I don't understand" or "can you say that again please". These are phrases I chant with my students immediately before we begin work on any task, as a reminder to them of what to do in case they run into difficulties, which in turn helps them to stay on track and use more English.

Interestingly, it also works quite well with voice control activities where you can drill language using different voices, emotions and speeds. Try playing with target phrases using quiet, angry, robot, slow motion, shy or super happy voices.

Kids love stories and narrative play

As much as nursery rhymes are a prominent feature in everyone's childhood, stories and books are just as important for language development. Within the language classroom, stories allow for several key components that reinforce language learning: they present authentic language in context, they usually present lots of visual support to match the text and they are often repetitive (especially books for younger children).

When choosing a story to "teach" from, try to focus on:

Books that repeat particular language features

Books whose images help students to understand the language on the page

Books that contain a limited amount of text on each page

A couple of interesting ways to use stories to focus students on grammar might be:

Ask the students to fill in a summary, or order then events of the story which are shown in pictures or written in short sentences after they have read the book.

Provide prompts for learners: First, second, then, after that, in the end.... And have learners reconstruct the story

Ask students to write or read a summary of the story and have them identify key verb phrases or target language and have them check what they have written against what you have on the whiteboard.

Ask students to write the next chapter of the book, and then identify the key features of language you wish to work with.

In this way, hopefully you can see that allowing learners to make mistakes is a central part of working with children, and that encouraging them to identify mistakes and correct their own work is a very useful way for them to study grammar because constructing a text beforehand allows them to deal with meaning first.

Authentic language use is more engaging and more meaningful

As we said before, focusing on authentic language use is a priority with young learners. Many educational boards that set local and national curricula will publish lists of texts that they expect their students to be able to deal with or produce by a certain age. These are like gold dust for language teachers who might only see their students once or twice a week.

By focusing on materials and contexts that are already familiar to students, there is less of a cognitive load on the learners when trying to apply and integrate new language. It also means that the language that is produced is more likely to be a useful and meaningful text, rather than "a list of sentences", which is something I see written on too many lesson plans than I'd like to admit.

A couple of ways of exploiting authentic language use in your lessons include:

Use a graded model of what you want the students to produce. If you want them to use the language in a spoken task, then have them listen to an example beforehand, ask them lots of CCQs to check comprehension before moving on to drilling and chanting the form prior to a production activity.

Deconstruct a text and stick it around the room, getting students up and moving about to find the answers to comprehension questions.

Ensure that learners are always working towards creating a "text" of some kind. I define "text" as a piece of connected language where sentences are meaningfully connected to each other (they use, for example, pronouns rather than repeat key nouns, and connectors to link ideas smoothly) or in a spoken text, one in which one utterance is a logical and coherent extension of or reply to the previous one.

Integrating skills reflects the way language is used in the real world

We also want to ensure that our language learning environment reflects the way our students encounter language in the real world as much as possible. This means that more often than not, our students are given the chance to respond to texts, reformulate their ideas and extend their abilities by applying language using as many skills as possible.

While the focus of your lesson might be grammar, it's important that this grammar focus is situated in the context of a range of opportunities to practice as many skills as possible (think of it as providing opportunities for learners to process the information using their eyes (reading), their ears (listening), their mouths (speaking) and their hands (writing).

So for example, a focus on question forms, might be situated in the context of a lesson where students have to role play an interview, but then write up the interview into a newspaper article or summary.

A nice example of this would be to use some of Chris Hadfield's videos recorded on the international space station where he answers common questions about life in space. Typically in the Pre-task stage, I would have students write lists of things they do everyday on earth, or how they do a particular thing on earth. In this example, Chris is shown making a sandwich in space, so I would have my learners make a list of their daily routines, and then discuss how these might be different if they were to do them in space.

Next, in the Main task activity, we watch the video, stopping it at key points and discussing it as a class in relation to how it is different for astronauts and why (e.g. why don' they use bread for sandwiches? Have my learners ever made a crumb-free sandwich? What normally happens to the crumbs?).

Then in the Post-task stage, learners are asked to plan questions to interview an astronaut. This is where the grammar focus comes in. I ask them to write questions they'd like, then I reformulate them on the board and we drill them using variations of voice control as we discussed earlier. Students them do the role play with as many different partners as time permits. This is all with the aim of collecting information for them to write a meaningful response to the interview they had with one person in the form of an article or summary.

Notice how the grammar focus doesn't take priority in the lesson, it's not the first thing students see or do, but it does follow a meaning-driven (often comprehension-based) task. I also avoid common forms of metalanguage (like auxiliary, past participle) - though depending on the level, I could have the learners group their questions into related "forms".....for example present/past/present perfect....or questions with "do" questions with "be" questions without "do".

Considering a Trinity Young Learners qualification? The introductory module of the Teaching Young Learners Extension Certificate is now available as a standalone fully online course - the TYLEC Headstart course .
James Pengelley contributes to the TESOL team as a CertTESOL/DipTESOL trainer as well as one of EFA's digital content managers. He holds a Cambridge DELTA, Trinity TYLEC and is currently completing a postgraduate diploma in teaching (secondary). He has made multiple contributions to English language teaching publications, including the English Australia Journal, The British Council and the International House Journal of Education and Development, which you can read .

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Teaching grammar for young learners: children learn languages differently to adults

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The grammar juggernaut continues to roll on despite many of the criticisms of an overly grammar-oriented focus that we've discussed previously on this blog. In spite of our criticisms, one of the confusing things to make clear is that we don't discourage teachers from teaching grammar entirely.