Leave us Kids Alone

It is fundamentally essential for children to learn English from a young age in this rapidly globalizing world. English knowledge will help to open many opportunities for them in the future. However, teaching English to children is not an easy job. Compared to adults, children are more energetic and have shorter attention spans.  The growing interest in the area of Teaching English to Young Learners has led to the publication of methodology books as well as teaching programs. Yet the question still remains: What makes a good instructional program for young learners? As a teacher of very young learners you find yourself dealing with children who start crawling under tables or throwing bits of paper, others who don’t want to say or do anything, and others crying because they don’t want to be there! And, of course – while all this is happening – trying to teach English. Although instructional practice is seen to stand apart from theory, both theorists and practitioner...

Pronunciation can be one of the most difficult parts for a language learner to master. To make matters worse, the speech that learners encounter outside the classroom is much more wilder than the forms they encounter in the classroom. Such speech contains phenomena which are rarely seen in textbooks. They are squeezed into bursts of the stream of speech, and it becomes difficult to recognise where one word begins and another ends, or indeed whether word-endings, syllables, or whole words have occurred at all. It is widely believed that pronunciation skills are related to musical skills. However no link between musical ability and pronunciation ability has ever been demonstrated, and there are large numbers of people who have one of these  ‘natural talents’ but not both. The general consensus is that second language pronunciation is a cognitive skill for which some people may have more natural aptitude and / or interest and motivation than others, but which everyone can learn to a ...

Acquiring a large vocabulary can benefit you in school, at work, and socially. It will enable you to understand others' ideas better and to have the satisfaction of getting your thoughts and ideas across more effectively.  While there are not any magic shortcuts to learning words, the larger your vocabulary becomes, the easier it will be to connect a new word with words you already know, and thus remember its meaning.  Reading alone may not be enough to make you learn new words.  Often people don't enjoy reading at all. It's more of a chore for them than a pleasure because they don't understand many of the words. If this is the way you feel about reading, t here is no point in trying to read something you simply are not able to understand or are not interested in. The important idea is to m ake a daily practice of noting words of interest to you for further study whenever you are reading, listening to the radio, talking to friends, or watching television.  Once yo...

Grammar teaching can work, but the magic formula still awaits discovery. Harsh criticism of traditional grammar teaching has continued over the last few decades, which has resulted in lack of confidence among language teachers.  The proponents of audiolingualism argue that immediate error correction is necessary and grammatical errors should be avoided at all costs. On the other hand, the theorists of natural approach persist that teachers who focus only on accuracy may sacrifice learners’ fluency. However, if no attention is paid to accuracy, then learners will not be accurate enough in using language in real context.  Even though  there may be  differences of opinion,  the general consensus is that g rammar teaching is necessary to help students possess greater command of the target language. This does not, however, mean that traditional grammar teaching is effective. English language teachers have always resorted to using course books when teaching gra...

Considerable attention is given to the question: What knowledge should a teacher have?. Besides general knowledge, culture and standard pedagogical competencies, the teacher of the future will need new skills and personal characteristics in order to meet contemporary challenges. As information becomes more easily accessible, the role of the teacher is changing. Teachers of the future will need both more authority… and, paradoxically, less authority. In order to achieve these demands we need a new world of ideas and methods in education. Many of us think a lot about the future, what it will be like to live a world where many of the existing jobs have disappeared. Some people think that technology will replace teachers. Others think that teaching will continue exactly as it’s done for the last one hundred and fifty years – question and answer, homework, and tests. Even today we are starting to experience a slow - or sometimes dramatic - change. Knowledge or fact can be looked up in an ...

School discipline presents enormous challenges for teachers. Getting it right takes balance, judgment, and wisdom. As an education professional who has been studying discipline in an educational setting for years, I am concerned by the lack of  theoretical grounding  in this realm. Given how much research goes into all other areas of a teacher’s job, this deficiency in what many see as a key part of their role is certainly the one that causes most sleepless nights. The general consensus is that the ways that you can use discipline will change as your child grows and develops. Under the age of one year, babies  don’t really understand right from wrong.  So when your baby pulls your hair, you might say ‘no’. You’ll probably need to do this over and over again. Punishing or using negative consequences for babies doesn’t work, because they don’t understand what they’ve done. From around the age of one year, toddlers start to understand a bit more about caus...