Road to gain confidence

What thoughts come to your mind regarding the teaching and learning of Writing, as a result of this session? Encourage students to learn from mistakes Don’t overmark the writing (Allow mistakes) Create some workshops to promote creative writing Be self-motivated in marking or revising on our own Enjoy writing Create some collaborative work to share and organise ideas with classmates Give more feedbacks to students on the ideas and organisation, rather than grammar

I think students do not develop reading skills simply through extensive reading. Extensive reading can increase lexile levels progressively. It also advocates the interest in reading. Reading does not have to be taught explicitly because we learn from what we read. However, reading lesson is important to students as they may overlook the reading skills and may not pay attention to the reading passages when doing reading comprehension questions. Teachers should guide them to do reading in a faster and more accurate way, such as the heading of the passages, skimming and scanning are important in reading. Reading lessons can be more interesting to students if the topic is related to their lives. Also with the help of pre-reading tasks, students can gain vocabulary knowledge and increase general information of the passage so that students could understand the text better. Teachers can enhance students' motivation in reading by providing interesting readers, such as sci-fi ficitio...

Teachers can use different vocabulary presentation techniques to develop students' interest in vocabulary learning, such as realia and visuals, word-building, matching, demonstrating, guessing from context. Apart from these skills, I think teachers can use songs or something related to students' daily lives to develop their interests too. Students can be helped to develop an independent vocabulary learning habit by arousing their own interests in learning English as teachers have limited time and other constraints in textbook use to teach English to students. Drilling and recycling the vocabulary may be a good way for them. My school's strategy is always to recycle the vocabulary items to the students so that they can use their words on their own ultimately. Some students still have difficulty in learning English but the use of mother tongue can fasten the translation and explanation time of teaching vocabulary. I switch to the mother tongue sometimes to let them catch at...

My students are always proud of not knowing 26 letters in the alphabet. It seems to be normal that we couldn't expect them to speak in English. That should not be the case. We were born to speak our mother tongue before knowing how to write. So we should encourage our students to speak up because I always believe "Wrong answers are still good answers". Everyone makes mistakes. We should embrace our own difficulties and overcome them. Language lessons should not be boring. We should focus more to the communicative approach in speaking lessons because the forms and accuracy are sometimes the boundaries which restricts us from making trials. I always like talkative students, because they have loads of wonderful ideas in their mind. A language teacher is to guide them to connect all their ideas with correct meaning. Pidgin English and other varieties of English are still comprehensible. Sometimes my students dare not speak, not just because they are shy, but also they lack ma...

Teaching grammar in HK schools is not an easy job. To most of us, I believe grammar is a very boring topic to students. Students still make mistakes because they could not make use of what they learnt during their lessons. It's about how much knowledge they could absorb through the presentation and practice stages. It is indeed another difficulty for me to guide them to make accurate and spontaneous production as their minds are still blank. Drilling is important in some ways, but when I changed the format, they would be very puzzled and did not know what they should do. It is hoped that the techniques which I learnt in today's lesson could boost up their interests in learning grammar and liven up their practices. It is always not a simple thing for us to strike a balance on too much drilling or livened up controlled practice. Still do I believe the ultimate goal is to guide them to use the grammar items correctly and naturally in their daily practices. I still have hope that I...

I strongly believe that grammar rules should be memorised by students because they could know if they had made a mistake instantly on their own. However the grammar rules are not the only things that students should remember. They should also make a clear mind on why they use it, i.e. the meaning and the function. These two aspects are also important because the current students are more eager to understand the meaning rather than being used to the way of spoonfeed teaching. They do not like drills that much and may find them torturing. However, thanks to my primary school teachers, I had suffered from drilling and through endless copying, I realised the grammar rules(forms). Therefore, I think drills are useful in teaching grammar, but only under the circumstances to those students who are eager to learn English. Boosting my students' interests is actually a headache to me now. Therefore I would just give them some exercises and not prolonged drilling. I personally prefer an indu...

There is a lot to say about my learning of grammar. I was sent to an "English Primary School" and that school really pushes us out of the limit in order to produce students qualified for the admission to the noble schools. I still remembered the Christmas holiday homework was torturing. I had a bad habit of holding my pencil hard so I remembered the time I finished the homework, my whole right hand sored after continous writing. It was actually 300 questions of question tags. I kept writing, "isn't she?" and "Yes, she is" and so on so forth repitively. My grammar was taught in an old-fashioned way- just doing 323, 369, 288 those old-school English exercise books. In my primary and secondary school times, I was also sent to a tutor, an old lady, who only loves using the old-styled grammar books. I was like a training machine to finish the exercises without a purpose. Still, I have to thank for these OLD guys, as my language awareness in grammar was enh...