Things you can do to improve your students English

María Clement Quesada

Teach them sounds in English

Children learn the letter by its sound and not its name

Each sound has an action These sounds are introduced in

groups of letters that sound different from each other to avoid confusion, eg: s, a, t, p, i ,n

Next step: Blending sounds

The process of saying individual sounds in a word and then running them together to make a word.

e.g. s – a – t = sat Vc and cvc words (vowel-consonant and

vowel-consonant-vowel words)

Are words with irregular spellings which cannot be read by blending

The irregular parts have to be remembered

Examples of tricky words:

Next, teach them “tricky” words and high frequency words: “Brick Words”

Use “English time”

Set up a “clock” that will advise the children it is time to speak in English, encourage them to use knew vocabulary and/or sentence structures that have been previously learnt.

English Speaking Chart

a chart to monitor their tries and and motivate them is alwaysuseful

Make them “talk” grammar

Instead of making the students fill in gaps and completing drill activities, teach them a rule and ask them to use it orally in different contexts that you will set up in class, for example, play dressing up and ask them to describe what they are wearing.

Use physical objects that children can touch, hold and move around to make them talk:

(clothes flashcards, the children can “dress up” the teddy bear)

Teach them grammar inductively(syntactic pattern recognition)

This refers to the process in machine learning of learning a formal grammar from a set of observations, thus constructing a model which accounts for the characteristics of the observed objects. (Wikipedia)

Inductive grammar:

We can make our young students learn grammar without noticing by generalizing a rule in different games:

(word order)

Smartboard display, “The Restaurant”

Smartboard display, “The house”

In both displays you can see the sentence structure that must be used, its there for the children to see and complete

Make them love grammar! “The Grammar game”

Set bags with small flashcards which include all parts of speech the children have learnt, incluiding adjectives, nouns, verbs in different tenses…

In groups ask them to “write” sentences in English that you´ve previously said in Spanish, the first group that writes it correctly gets a point, this is motivating and also enables immediate feedback, for the teacher must write the correct sentence on the board to give the answer to the children.

“The grammar game”