It’s more important for teachers to help students find ways to practice their English outside the classroom. The more efficient students become at autonomous learning, the better they’ll be able to overcome interruptions and make up for lost time.
It will be even more challenging if you're a self-learner as you do not have a teacher looking over you and steering your learning. But it’s helpful to learn from the teaching world and pick up teacher tips that you can apply to your own studies and techniques.
Students learning new words in English generally progress steadily up until the pre-intermediate and intermediate levels. But after that, they start to struggle.
This is because there’s a big difference between the volume of the vocabulary that intermediate students and upper-intermediate students need to know.
That’s a big jump in numbers. But the real challenge is that those 5,000+ new words are not very frequent. Consequently, students don’t encounter them very often, making it difficult to recall them and leap from one level to the next.
While there’s no simple answer to this problem, there are ways to help students overcome it. The following framework can be a big help in any classroom:
There are three steps to teach students how to learn new words effectively:
Thanks to the internet and technology, there are many ways that students can engage with the English language outside the classroom.
However, simple exposure to a new language is not enough – it takes much longer and is less effective than active learning. When students do something with the language they’re exposed to; it is far more memorable.
That’s why it’s crucial for teachers to help their students seek out English in their own time and use the language, turning passive exposure into active learning.
It’s crucial to help students improve their guesswork. Instead of asking online translators to translate every time they encounter a new word, they should be able to guess the meaning of new vocabulary differently.
One way to get students to learn and retain vocabulary is to get them to create word cards:
This helps to connect learning inside and outside the classroom, and it’s fun!
Finally, teachers should give students ideas on how to memorize words outside the classroom. You can have your students produce word cards and use a Word Store booklet to practice tasks like matching words with images or definitions.
Lastly, it’s important to teach students memory tricks or mnemonics so they can retain the new words they encounter.
Learning English with music can enhance learning and create a more engaging and dynamic classroom environment. In a previous post, we discussed if music can help you learn a language; this post looks at how music can be incorporated into the classroom.
Using music in your classroom can help improve student motivation, focus, and retention of information. Here are some ways you can use music to enhance your classroom teaching:
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Have you considered studying abroad? Moving to Canada to study? With more than 100 world-class universities across the country, there’s good reason to. From coast to coast to coast, it offers many international students a safe and supportive learning environment and the opportunity to work after graduation.
Want to learn more? In this guide, we cover ten things you should know about studying in Canada:
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There are lots of resources available to English teachers today: from textbooks to online teaching tools, they can all aid and enrich English lessons. Many ESL teachers also introduce authentic English material into their lessons to expose learners to the language as it is spoken in the real world.
Authentic material is any material written in English that was not created for intentional use in the English classroom. Using this content for teaching English can make the teaching experience even more engaging, imaginative and motivating for students. It can also be useful to elicit genuine responses from English language learners.
The great thing about using authentic material is that it is everywhere, which makes it easy to find, and simple for learners to practice English in their own time. Remember that it isn’t limited to articles from newspapers and magazines. Songs, TV programs and films, radio and podcasts, leaflets, menus – anything written in English constitutes authentic material.
The best content to select depends on the learners, their level of English and the course content the English teacher wishes to focus on. It’s also a good idea to find out the learners’ interests – after all, there’s no point trying to get students fascinated by a text on the latest sci-fi movie if they’re all fans of action films.
The materials should reflect a situation that a student may face in an English-speaking environment – this will help them transition into a world where English is the norm. In this world, people use abbreviations, body language is important and they’ll use 'filler' sounds – such as 'ummm' – when they are speaking English – and learners will encounter these in authentic material.
It’s important not to overwhelm learners with the first piece of authentic material. So, choose articles, songs or sections of TV programs or movies that aren’t too difficult to understand or take too long to get through.
