My student is a low beginner. Where and how do I start?

One way or another, we have or perhaps will experience teaching a student who is a low beginner. Generally, low beginners are described as having limited comprehension skills, communication, and vocabulary. They have difficulty understanding sentences despite repeating and altering the words. And so with this in mind, the question now is where should you start?

Based on my experience, I started the lessons with basic vocabulary. Before your student can understand grammar concepts it is important to familiarize them first with English words. You could follow a book or you could also base it on a theme. For instance, vocabulary words related to clothing, transportation, or occupation can be a good start. Basic English conversations can also be introduced. You could teach them about greetings, introductions or even how to express likes and dislikes. Once you see that your student has shown improvement and is knowledgeable about basic vocabulary words, then you can advance to the first steps of grammar.

Handling low beginners can be challenging because this kind of setting will test your effectiveness as an instructor. This may be a chance to assess yourself to find out how efficient you are in delivering the lessons to your students. Good luck! ^ ^

Helpful resource for ideas on basic English conversation for low beginners: ESLgold

BBC Learning English

For additional English lesson resources you could use for your classes, here is a website I found that might help. BBC Learning English - For teachers contains teaching ideas and worksheets that are very useful and interesting. They also have a mini-series entitled The Flatmates. What's nice about The Flatmates is that each episode comes with a short grammar and vocabulary lesson. It's like hitting two birds with one stone. Your students are entertained while they learn new lessons at the same time :)

Introduction to Pronouns

Here is a very short visual aid you can use for lessons about Pronouns.

As we all know, the English grammar has several types of pronouns but I only included personal pronouns in this lesson because this is only the introduction. I will try to do visual aids for the rest of the pronoun types in the future ^^

Grammar lesson 2

Introduction to Pronouns

References

English Club

Suite101.com Middle School Lesson Plans

Pronouns

Hi everyone! My blog still doesn't contain much but I'd like to thank each and everyone of you for regularly visiting my blog :))

I am currently working on another visual aid for the topic: Introduction to Pronouns. I'm in the process of researching information and making it sound as simple as possible to make it easy to understand. My area will be having a power interruption the whole day tomorrow so I'd probably be updating my blog on Wednesday. Feel free to send in questions if you have any and I will do my best to find answers to all your queries.

Cheers to us ESL teachers!

Here is the preview to the lesson I'm working on.

Teachers' ideas on ways to avoid boredom in class

I already have a recent post about how to break the monotony in class and it also contained my own ways of handling this common situation. However, I wasn't satisfied with sharing just my thoughts on this, so figured it would be better if fellow ESL teachers could also share their own ideas. I posted this topic on teachers forums and also asked some teachers for their advice and here is what they have to share:

1. Activity: Story telling

         Provide a short story for your student to read but reveal the ending of the story. Ask your students to re-tell the story in their own words and also challenge them to think of a suitable ending for the story. This activity can help your students develop their creativity and also practice their speaking skills. This is also a good opportunity for your students to learn new vocabulary words along the way.


     2.  Activity: Question and Answer

         When your students are bored, one sure way to get their attention back is to make them talk. For this activity, you need to make a list of questions to ask your students. Try to make questions based on a theme or a topic, like holidays, shopping, environmental problems, etc, or you could also make fun, random, out-of-nowhere questions. Don't be satisfied with yes or no answers. Keep them talking by challenging them to give you an answer in not less than 5 sentences.
         To help you out with this activity, try visiting Conversation Questions for the ESL/EFL Classroom for questions on different topics.


     3. Activity: Spin the Wheel

      
         For this activity you're going to need a spin wheel just like the image above. You're going to fill each slot with different tasks.  Each of your students will then take turns in spinning the wheel. When it stops check which slot the arrow is pointing to, this is the task your student should do. Make it fun by filling it with missions according to difficulty (easy, average, difficult).
         This would work best with group classes.


      4. Remember:  Warm-Ups and Time-Fillers are essential

        Every ESL teacher must know the importance of having warm-up and time-filler activities for you class. These activities help catch your student's attention and it also helps bring energy to your class on days when your students aren't in the mood or are just plain bored. Warm-ups and time-fillers are also great for filling up time when your lessons run shorter than expected.


      5. Free-talking
         Most of the respondents suggested that free-talking is what gets their students awake on ho-hum classes. Teachers recommend that you find what fancies your students the most and pretty much go from there. Based on their experiences, male students are usually very much into sports, music and movies. Females on the other hand enjoy talking mostly about fashion, celebrities and TV drama series. If in case you aren't familiar with their interests, I suggest reading up about it and sharing what you've read to let them know that you also consider their interests.



-- Thanks to Teachers Harvz, Carmi, Gyan, Teen, Jackielyn and Frances for the input :))

Introduction to Verbs

Thanks to Google Docs, I finally finished creating my first visual aid that you could use for teaching basic grammar lessons. This visual aid can be used for teaching verbs to low beginners. It contains a very short description of what a verb is, examples of a verb and an introduction to the three simple verb tenses. You're all welcome to take a look at it and or use it for your own classes. I hope you find it useful :) Please feel free to comment about it, thank you!

Grammar lesson 1:
           Introduction to Verbs


References:
English Club
INTERLINK Language Centers

Help! My student's bored!

ESL education here in the Philippines is most commonly done on a one-on-one basis that could last for several months. I hate to admit it but I believe that some of you might agree with me that this kind of set up can sometimes be a wearisome routine. Especially if you meet with your student for an hour a day, five times a week. Monotony could be the culprit in affecting your student's performance and attitude towards class. So how do we deal with this?
What I usually do first off  is to plan the whole month's lessons and activities very well. Aside from following a syllabus, I always try to vary my lessons twice a week. And I declare Fridays to be Free-days. Free days are when we steer away from our workbook and do different activities such as games, listening exercises, sharing and discussing interesting videos (could be movie trailers, funny videos, music videos or sports clips) from Youtube and of course, speaking activities about random topics.
At times when I notice that my student is especially quiet or distracted, I call for a breather and I use up the time to do quick activities or games. I make a list of short activities or games that we can do during times like this, one of them would be a game I call "Give me 10!". This game is very simple and can be played by any level. All you have to do is ask your student to give you a list of 10 things about a certain topic. For instance, ask your student for 10 things he/she did in the last 2 hours, or 10 things you can find in his/her room, or 10 things that didn't exist 50 years ago, or 10 random facts about themselves etc etc.
I'm presently doing a quick survey of tips on how to avoid boredom in class from fellow ESL teachers. I hoping I could get their opinions by tomorrow and I'll definitely share it with you guys :)