Practice activities
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My reaction on reading from Language Reader
(Which of the two suggested readings - Thornbury, Ur - do you find more useful and informative? Why?)
From my point of view, there is no doubt that both authors provide useful and valuable information, but I must admit that Ur is closer to me than Thornbury, because he is more understandable.
If I had a broken leg Ur would say: “Oh man, your leg is broken,” but Thornbury’s reaction would be: “Excuse me Sir, it is my duty to inform you that your fibula is fractured” so Thornbury would give me a headache sooner or later. Moreover, Ur often highlights the importance of entertaining, “heterogeneous” and interesting class to attract students’ attention and arouse their interest in the process of learning. I also like his ideas that we should be concerned about our students’ interests or even lives and transform the care into speaking activities, because it’s much more beneficial for their improvement.
I can’t say that Thornbury’s ideas are bad, on the contrary, he is an excellent expert in his area but his interpretation is so boring and cold. Teaching is a lively process and every classroom has its own soul. Therefore I am on Ur’s side.
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Key words from the reading
1.) accuracy, fluency
2.) intelligible
3.) scaffolding
4.) efficacy
5.) heterogeneity
6.) personalization
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I think that practice activities are the most important part of learning/teaching English, because everybody wants to USE his English in real life (speaking, writing) or for his/her own needs (watching movies/news, reading books). From my experience, most students want only one thing when learning English - they want to be able to speak, to communicate. It's very difficult to persuade them that to be good at speaking they should also learn English through reading, writing and listening. When I meet this kind of student who would like to learnn English only through speaking I always tell him - "Ok, I was at the cinema with my younger daughter last Sunday. What about you, what did you do last Sunday?"
He is not able to say anything, of course, because he doesn't know any vocabulary, grammar etc. and mainly, he doesn't even understand what I told him.
When teaching practice activities I like doing "role play" and improvisation which means that I probably prefer activities focused on fluency e.g. Unexpected storylines.pdf
On the other hand, it would be a big mistake to use only these kinds of practice activities just because I like them. I think, taht "drilling" is also very important tool to be better at English so I can easily recommend some "accuracy" activities from Language Reader we were supposed to read. There are great ideas. Moreover, I also liked the activity in our classroom provided by our teacher (teaching grammar through a story) e.g.
Learning past simple through a story.pdf
Books and other sources I use
For teaching practice activities I use a lot of sources from the internet. Some of the most useful web pages are: https://www.onestopenglish.com/
and
https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/
but the internet is an inexhaustible source of activities for teaching English. I also like creating my own activities, these are only 5-10 minutes activities but I think that they are very useful because I tailor them to my students' needs.
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My criteria for choosing a good practice activity
The most important thing for successful teaching is to know my students as much as possible so then I can choose an activity they will enjoy. It's quite easy to choose "fluency" activity like playing roles or discussing a topic they are interested in but as I mentioned above the drilling is also very important tool for improving their English. Many students do not like drilling but it could be different when a teacher is able to choose a topic or article which attracts students' attention. So my criteria for choosing a good practice activity are obvious. On one hand, they should be funny and enjoyable. On the other hand they should be connected with students' interests. I remember that when I was teaching my students to describe a picture using present continuous I had chosen 12 different pictures (12 students - 12 pictures) according to their hobbies and interests and the activity went really well.
