Secondary School Foreign Language Classroom in the United Kingdom - Speech or Presentation Example

Notebook of Instructional Materials Student’s Name Institution Affiliation Notebook of Instructional Materials Secondary school foreign language classroom in United Kingdom (Elementary (K4 – 8th Grade) Scanned handouts for the course: These are mostly book extracts, teachers’ notes, journal articles, and copies of diagrams and images from printed sources, and other important course materials. These documents can provide students with extra information on the foreign language and increase their understanding of the language. Susskind (2008) noted that these handouts help to guide the students through the classroom and offer them a framework for placing their individual notes. They allow instructors to cover more materials within a short time than they would normally be able to cover, hence increasing the amount of instruction for the students. Students are able to process, gather, and retain information more easily and quickly than before. Poems: Poetry is a collaborative and effective method of learning language and personal expression. Simple poems in a foreign language can offer the students a framework for expressing idea, which are important to them without the limitations of grammatical accurateness. Pattern poems and picture poems can make the foreign language a means of personal creativity, expression, as well as development. Popular and easy song scripts can also facilitate awareness of sentence flow, intonation, and pronunciation. The teacher can have the students’ read each other the poems aloud all at once, checking for each other rhythm and pronunciation. The whole class can do a choral reading at the end of the lesson. Learners can be asked to rewrite the poem, altering their meaning. Picture poems provide a visual point of view on the words arrangement and hence serve as an effective way of encouraging students to interact with the targeted vocabularies (Moore, 2002). By using non-grammatical approaches, the students can be able to play with the language and produce verbal and visual output. Games and Activities: These approaches offer a fun and interacting learning setting and are very helpful for effective language learning. They can produce successful, effective, and stimulating teaching in the foreign language and culture. When students are engaged, active participants, and enjoying themselves, they are able to retain new vocabulary, as well as other linguistic functions, more easily than when they are simply learning by performing drills or rote. Martison & Chu (2008) argued, “Games are effective tools for learning because they offer students a hypothetical environment in which they can explore alternative decisions without the risk of failure.” Some games such as hangman, 1-2-3-4 whiteboard, alphabet game, charades, bingo, happy face, and name games are important for vocabulary review and practice. Others such as dice game with verbs, conjugation scramble, conjugation game, and pronoun and verb card practice are important for verb and grammar conjugation (Rauschenberg, 2012). Flashcards: Flashcards of important questions and vocabulary are an important component of teaching foreign languages. The aim of the foreign language course is to be able to speak and write in the language, know and comprehend the grammar, and learn a large amount of vocabularies. Flashcards are useful in teaching the meaning of new words and in getting students to memorize them better. They save on time, as teachers do not have to draw on the board, look for, or make suitable pictures. According to McNeil (2004), flashcards are wonderful memory aids and students can remove the words they know and put those that they do not know back into the deck. Songs: When students listen to a song or rap for the first time, the naturally seek to comprehend what the lyrics as all about. When the rap or song is engaging, they chant or sing along. As a result, songs are about developing the students’ listening comprehension and about repeating important words, structures, and chunks of language. They are this ideal for developing pronunciation, intonation patterns and word stress. In a song, important lexis, structure, and language are repeated without the process becoming boring for the learners. Imitation in a critical aspect in the process-the more engaging and fun, the students, find a song, the more they will develop positive feelings about the language in the song. As a result, this affective dimension plays a crucial function in the course of the students’ learning of a foreign language. Course books, Magazines, and newspapers: Reading a book or magazine that is of interest to the student is the best method of building vocabulary. Practice exercises: To function well in a foreign language class, practice is essential. Through structured drills and exercises, the students can learn to produce the expressions quickly and almost automatically. Practice exercises in a course, grammar book and in the real world are important (Lam, 2009). The best way of learning foreign language is by doing them, not just by studying about them or performing exercises. Interesting readings: Grabe (2009) and Day and Bamford (1998) suggested ways to promote extended reading in a reading curriculum including the availability and introduction of numerous attractive reading materials. More specific instructional options for the teachers included reading interesting materials to students, finding out what students like to read and why, and creating ways to interest students in reading topics. In addition, recording students’ progress and creating incentives for students to start reading. Interesting texts and readings help to build on vocabulary knowledge and comprehension skills. Warm-up activities: This is a useful strategy for stimulating vocabulary and structure recall. The students may be asked to practice conversation exchanges using the vocabularies they have already learnt. They may also take on the role of the teacher in initiating the exchanges. In pairs, students can try to remember as much as they can about the vocabularies they have learnt about the foreign language. Role-Play: This is a common drama activity, which is incorporated in foreign language classrooms. The teachers should offer a set script for the students to read or memorize and simply ask them to read their individual lines to other students. Foreign language learning involves not only the abilities to read, write, listen, and speak, but it also requires learners to learn how to observe, predict, analyze, and present information in different ways. Drama activities in the classroom can provide opportunities for the development of other important abilities in communication and the four basic forms of literacy. Role-play is a strategy that is carried out to help in the developing of oral skills in language learning. It develops communication skills as it offers a practical illustration of what happens either when people communicate, non-verbally or verbally (Claxton, 2008). It also develops problem-solving and critical-thinking skills and research skills as they are highly engaging activities that increase the student participation in the preparation process and during the activity itself. Elementary level beginning ESOL in an American Classroom The teaching materials for elementary level students should include photographs, magazine pictures, posters, information material from government agencies and departments, clocks, art materials, puppets, ‘flyers, brochures, and advertisements,’ forms, timetables and schedules, manipulatives, real objects, money, models, interactive activities, and maps. According to Connor, Morrison and Fishman et al. (2007, p. 464), “many children fail to reach potential proficient levels in reading only because they do not receive the amount and instruction they need.” In addition, they note, “instructional strategies that help one student may be ineffective when applied to another student with different skills” (p. 464). Indeed, they argue, “the impact of any particular instructional strategy appears to depend on children’s language and literacy skills.” (p. 464) Photographs: Photographs of students as well as of locations and scenes around the school and in the community should be taken. Photos should be taken on field trips in order for the student to create illustrated language experience booklets or stories later. The teacher should bring personal family photographs to school and encourage students to bring theirs-and talk about them. Photos should be used to introduce and practice grammar structures (for instance, talking about events shown in a photograph is a natural way of introducing the simple past tense). Magazines: The teacher should collect pictures that feature people of diverse backgrounds in various situations and settings. Most magazine advertisements usually depict interesting scenarios that can stimulate written and oral stories and role plays. The teacher should encourage students to imagine events after or before the scenes depicted in the pictures. Posters: Government departments, public service organizations, as well as publishers often provide posters free of charge. The teacher should ensure that the posters carry a simple message and that the selection depicts people of various backgrounds in various situations and settings. Posters should be used sparingly and the teacher should avoid cartoon-like illustrations, as caricatures of racial characteristics may be offensive. Bulletin boards and classroom walls should always contain more student-produced materials rather than professionally produced materials. Information material from government agencies and departments: Free materials such as citizenship information, food guides, as well as tourist brochures are often available and can even be translated into various languages. Although the text of some of these resources may be too hard for beginners to read, the illustrations are very useful. An illustrated guide to balanced nutrition, for example, can be used to teach the name of various foods. Students might produce their individual versions of the guide by categorizing the foods they are accustomed to eating into the food groups. Clock: Both a digital and a traditional clock are important to teach the students the two ways of expressing time (for instance, 12:40 and twenty minutes to one). Puppets: Hands puppets are important in presenting dialogues and the learners can use finger puppets to develop as well as present role-plays. Students can also make their individual puppets. Art Materials: The teacher should maintain a supply of sticky colored paper, markers, construction paper, Bristol board, scraps of fabric and yarn, glue, wallpaper samples, sparkles, cotton wool, pipe cleaners, tongue depressors, cardboard rolls and boxes, packing materials, as well as other supplied for making posters, books, and models. Flyers, brochures, and advertisements: The teacher should use newspaper advertisements, supermarket flyers, and announcements to help students read simple messages, learn basic vocabulary, and make comparisons (for example, which store has the cheapest tomatoes this week?) Forms: The teacher should assist students to complete school information cards, library card, or applications for a social insurance numbers. The students should be taken to the community library to hand in their application forms, as well as to borrow their first books. Some libraries allow teachers to borrow a boxful of books for classroom use. Parents may be invited to tag along to check out adult materials for second language learners and new readers. Most public libraries also have multilingual collections. Timetables and schedules: The teacher should use the school timetables, garbage collection schedules, local transit schedules and so on to assist students to extract information from such text. Manipulatives: The teacher should obtain manipulatives such as counters, blocks, and interlocking two-and three-dimensional shapes from primary teachers as well as the math departments. These can be used to teach prepositions, for instance, in, beside, on, various mathematical concepts and terms, and the names of colors, shapes, and numbers. Real Objects: Almost any interesting object can be used to develop descriptive language and to stimulate discussion. For instance, interesting leaves and stones collected in the school park or yard, household and classroom objects, fruits and vegetables, sports equipment, clothing, tools and equipments for specialized subjects such as family and science studies. In addition, interesting artifacts, which students bring from home, can also be used. Money: Real money can be used to teach students the name of bills and coins and to practice counting money and making change in English. The students can also use money in role-play situations. Models: Animals, model cars as well as other toys make a change from pictures and may appeal to the kinesthetic learning style of most students. The models can be used to create scenes that depict what students are likely to see in the supermarket, in the street, at home, and other places. Maps: Students can learn prepositions and the words for directions at the same time as they become familiar with their new environment and learn about their new country. The teacher should begin with a map of the schools and the neighborhood and then move on to maps of larger areas. Students should be involved in planning field trips using local transit schedules and maps. Interactive games, puzzles, audios, songs: These interactive activities focus on skills, which familiarize the students with simple sentence structures, vocabulary review, present tense, grammar review through group games and work as well as activities to assist students comprehend the concept of metaphors, and apply them in their writing. Teachers can use the sentence scrambles game. Students are given blank index cards, or they can just cut out pieces of paper. It can help students to learn how to create sentences. Pictionary is also a simple game where students or the teacher draws something on the board and the first small group to write on their whiteboard the correct word symbolized by the drawings get points. Charades is also another useful game where teachers or other students act out verbs, which need to be guessed by student groups (Ferlazzo & Sypnieski, 2012). The classroom should have many word lists as well as pictures with words posted on the walls. Sentence strips and word banks: Teachers should also use 24-inch oak-tag strips and standard teaching materials to write students’ sentences. The students can be asked to create sentences out of the words found in their world bank: the oral reinforcement is important. Producing sentence with words from the work bank enables the students to manipulate sentences and words. Both the sentence strips and word bank are important language-development records. Holes punched in the ends of sentence strips enable them to be stored on hooks or pegs in the way. They represent a rich record of every student language development. The sentence strips are practiced on a regular basis in a similar manner to the words in the world bank. Indeed, they can be used as evidence in student portfolios. Most immigrant students arrive with the knowledge of the alphabet in their first languages, or a substantial portion appears to know the names of the letters of the Roman alphabet, at least partially, in English (Gunderson, 2007). Alphabet books: These books are very helpful for students. There are hundreds of alphabet books, which are helpful for the students. A sample listing of alphabet books is available at www.goodreads.com/list/show/9500.alphabet_picture_books. There is also a variety of websites, which contains listings of alphabet books and related activities. Most young students love to learn as well as sing the alphabet songs and memorize poems about the alphabet. Printed words and sentences- such words and sentences are used to name as well as describe the items surrounding the students and their own interests. The students’ interests can be learned from the results of an interest inventory. Print can produce basic, although limited English syntactic structures. Students are able to monitor English in print, and they benefit from the monitoring in an active sense. They are also able to make predictions about English. The teacher has to select materials that interesting to the students. Wordless picture books and big books are useful for such activities. Word cards: Word cards can help students to become familiar with various vocabularies and to practice grammar. They should have only one word whereas others should have word endings. Elgort (2007) found that vocabulary learning using word cards bring about implicit knowledge. The vocabulary is unconsciously and easily accessible for use and enters into lexical relationships with other words due to deliberate learning. Comprehension of words learned in this manner is openly available (Nation & Newton, 2009) Advanced college EFL students in China Most EFL teachers normally utilize resources and materials, which help bring the outside world into the classroom. Such materials may range from non-linguistic items, for instance realia or simple visuals, through to authentic texts including newspaper and magazine articles, videos of TV programs, or audio recording of conversation. Exposing the students to pieces of the outside world plays a crucial role when it comes to offering practical language contribution, creating a meaningful and dynamic situation for learning as well as increasing the student motivation. EFL teachers are expected to attend to various needs of students that are different in every possible aspect. A student-centered approach should aim to improve learning for every student through using various classroom practices to accommodate differences in students’ academic readiness, learning profiles, interests, and effective needs. In a humanistic orientation, the student-centered emphasis builds on the philosophical pillars of individual freedom, responsibility, and natural goodness (Elias & Merriam, 2005). Songs: English songs are a useful teaching tool for the EFL students. Nowadays, most students are engaged in various popular cultural forms (from both the west and the east) outside the school. Their experiences with computer games, popular music, television, and films are very motivating. Integrating pop music into the English curriculum can help to increase the students’ motivation, as well as their involvement in EFL learning. Learning through English songs can be more useful in memorization in isolation as the lyrics of the songs contain rich cultural and linguistic knowledge. The songs are also important in communicative language teaching. Text to Speech (TTS) Technology): This technology synthesizes natural sound speech from any texts through special computer programs. This technology can enable the EFL students to listen to any topic and text; they can make audio versions from every text (mp3 or wav files) (Sobkowiak, 2003). The students can also adjust the reading speed according to their individual needs and generate elocution exercises for themselves. Single words can also be read. Students can make mini dialogue via this program. The language teacher can create a list of words that are mispronounced frequently by the students and save the list for later usage. The students can listen to the words and repeat whilst the file is placed. They can also write short sentences in English and listen to the dialogues. This technology can make learning fascinating and enjoyable (Warchauer & Meskill, 2000). They can also create short dialogues. The students can write dialogues while altering the speakers of the program. Students can read and listen to a newspaper online. Accent reduction software: This software can help learners to improve their pronunciation due to factors such as practice sessions in which the learners can take risks without stress and fear of error and can receive immediate feedback. Flickr: This is an online photo repository with very many users. It can help to prepare for oral examinations, for instance, proficiency, CAE, and Cambridge First Certificate exams. The teacher should ask the students to describe similar photos and point out the differences between the two through an interlocutor (examiners who undertake the oral examination) led conversation. Role Play: Role-play will offer the students with the opportunity of dealing with the changeable nature of language. This technique will develop the students’ skills choosing non-verbal and verbal communication strategies in various situations. Course books: Course books will offer the learners logical and understandable directions as well as a sense of progress. Students will be able to see clearly how much and what they have accomplished in various courses as they proceed in their textbook. Most course books usually include goals from the syllabus as experienced teachers mostly write them. These books also offer teachers’ ready material that makes planning take less time as planning had already been made and the materials have already been chosen. In addition, it encourages learner independence, as each learner is free to look ahead and use the books without waiting upon the teacher. Course books are important as they teach language structure, namely vocabulary, grammar, and rules (Harmer, 2001). Authentic Dialogues and materials: Such dialogues are imperative when it comes to listening comprehension. The dialogues enable the learners to be confronted with ‘real life’ experienced where they will have to function. By using the authentic dialogue, the teacher can manage to focus on differences in pronunciation, and the way incomplete structures and intonations are used to articulate meaning. The teacher can have the students focus on various area, and then lead to students to discuss and practice of such areas. Kelly, Kelly, Offner and Vorland (2002) noted that authentic materials compliment English classes since they enliven the classroom and create a more positive attitude towards learning. Such materials can include real advertisements, real magazine articles, horoscopes, and cooking recipes. These texts and materials can be very beneficial in learning English. Richards (2001) noted that these materials offer real cultural information, have an encouraging impact on the learners’ motivation, exposes the learner to authentic language, provide a more creative strategy to teaching and relate more closely to the learner’s needs. Learners are able to interrelate with the authentic content and language instead of the form. The students will feel that they are learning English as it is applied outside the classroom. Newspaper and videos will be a good source of English language use. Authentic texts are created to accomplish various social purposes in the language community in which they are produced. As a result, newspapers, poems, novels, magazine articles, manuals, handbooks, telephone directories, recipes, television, computer programmes, and radio broadcasts are examples of authentic texts (Kilickaya, 2004). Scripted Dialogues: Such dialogues are very useful especially when the instructor is trying to focus on the correct form. It is mainly apt when the focus is on stimulating oral work. Scripted dialogues enable the teachers to steer the class towards recycled or new language skills while maintaining minimal irregularities. References Claxton, N. (2008). 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San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Grabe, W. (2009). Reading in a second language: Moving from theory to practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harmer, J. (2001) The Practice of English language teaching. Harlow: Longman. Kelly, C., Kelly, L., Offner, M., & Vorland, B. (2002). Effective ways to use authentic materials with ESL/EFL students. The Internet TESL Journal, 8(11) Kilickaya, F. (2004). Authentic materials and cultural content in EFL classrooms. The Internet TESL Journal, X(7). Lam, J. (2009). The independent learner: A practical guide to learning a foreign language at home from scratch to functional. Lulu Press Inc Martinson B., & Chu, S. (2008) Game-based learning in design history. Handbook of Research on Effective Electronic Gaming in Education. Pennsylvania: IGI Global. 478-488. McNeil, A. (2004). How to learn a foreign language: A question and answer resource guide. Washington, MI: Language Experts, LLC Moore, J. (2002). Practicing poetry: Teaching to learn and learning to teach. English Journal, 91(3), 44-50. Nation, I., & Newton, J. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL listening and speaking. New York: Routledge. Rauschenberg, J. (2012). Games in the foreign language classroom: Instruction for the games. Retrieved from http://ms.loganhocking.k12.oh.us/~madame/teacher/presentations/Games.html Richard, J. (2001). Curriculum development in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sobkowiak, W. (2003). TTS in EFL CALL- some pedagogical considerations. Teaching English with Technology: A Journal for Teachers of English, 3 (4). Susskind, J. (2008). PowerPoint’s power in the classroom: enhancing students’ self-efficacy and attitudes but not the behavior. Computers and Education, 50, 1228-1315. Warchauer, M., & Meskill, C. (2000) Technology and second language teaching. In J. Rosenthal (Ed.), Handbook of undergraduate second language education (pp. 303-318). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. 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