English Grammar Teaching For High School Students

Open English World

http://www.openenglishworld.com/

The purpose of the website is to train learners’ listening ability, and the target learners would be high-level ones. The courses are displayed in conversation type. Even though the speed of the conversation can not be controlled, since it offers various-difficulty content for us to choose, new users could start with the easiest course to study or any of the topics they are interested in.

When you are on this website, you would see there is a menu list on the left side. If you just want to get some input by the site, you can click English Idioms, Business English, or English Conversation and select a title listed on the next page later.

Teacher can use this website to train students’ speaking and listening ability, since word content and sound truck are provided for free. For example, teacher can ask students to work in pair in class in 5~10 minutes, choose a unit and remember the content. Later, students have to come to the front and practice the conversation with their partners. Then teacher could score the grades of the students.

Next, I would like to introduce another website which is to test individual English proficiency. The selectable-quiz test, made by Dublin School of English, is for junior-high-school-level students (13-15); it covers all basic grammas, and the way of scoring is clear that you can exam your test result with the answer the site offered.

http://www.dse.ie/index.php?module=vquiz&func=run&quizid=5

The website below is a wonderful one that there is a plenty of interesting grammar quizzes introduced. The learners could be junior high school students or high school ones, and even the adults can exam themselves by the tests listed there.

Grammar Choices

http://www.dcsh.tp.edu.tw/eng_j/english/grammar%20choices.htm

Learning by Doing

I was impressed with the issue “learning by doing” this week, in which there are several important disciplines, including :

Ü Learning is active.

Ü Teacher is facilitator.

Ü Teaching and learning are sharing experiences.

Ü Do small group activities.

Ü Students should be responsible for themselves.

Ü Ask students to do some reflection.

Most of us used to be taught in class without the practical team activities, so sometimes we do not really understand why things would be like the ways we learned. Therefore, knowledge in the book is hard to be relative to our life experiences since we seldom face the situation. However, if we can learn by doing some actual activities, I believe we would get more than the target knowledge itself.

Take our mid-term project as an instance. When we were asked to do something to promote English Department, we had to collect plenty of information about the topic, take many pictures, find out new function of PPT for making an interesting and attractive project, etc. By doing so, we were impressed with every small step of this group working. We did not only learn various techniques of utilizing computer programs, but also the background of English department and the skills of negotiating with my partner and coordinating a report. Hence, it is obvious that learning by doing could be the most ideal way for studying.

On the other hand, on the website we were taught to use concordancer to look up word use. It can be supposed to be another great Internet self-learning system that learners could quickly get the point of the word use by reading those organized sentences. I think it is really helpful in our learning.

Situational Learning

In the lesson on May 7^th, situational learning was mentioned as an important way for employees’ training. I was impressed with this kind way of learning. I think it is obvious that no matter how much we read or learn, if we don’t put our knowledge into practice, we may not remember and apply the obtained skills in the real situations. Therefore, when it comes to learning acquisition, we know that putting something abstract into real action enhance our memory, the effect of which is much better than that of reading in a pedantic way.

For instance, for FLA students, the strategies of talking on the phone are not easy to learn because they have seldom opportunities to practice their on-phone techniques. However, if teacher could offer a situation and make students do some activities in which students can use what they just learned immediately, students would experience the situational communication. I believe it will dramatically improve their knowledge absorbability and make great progress in learning.

PART 10 --- Certificate

When students learned new vocabulary, they could start practice the simple sentences with directive type sentence. Besides, teacher should aware them of the vocabulary which is vowel-initial.

acrobat / clown / cowboy / cowgirl / monster / dancer
I am a ____________.
She is a ____________.
He is a ____________.

Students have to sit in a circle, and teacher has to write down or put the word cards on the board for them. Then, teacher hands out a paper or a card to each student and gets him/her to write down one of the word on the board as his/her certificate. Later, the first student has to introduce himself/herself and the classmate sitting on him/her right hand. Also, the next speaker would be the one sitting on the left side of the first speaker, and he/she has to do it in the same way. And the rest of the class could do that. During the first round, every the goal of the game is that every student has to show his/her card to the class and try to memorize their classmates’ certificates, but students have to hide their certificate card and do the practice in the second round. Finally, teacher could request them to replace “she” and “he” with students own name when they are playing in the third round. This time, the way of excise would be a little different. The first speaker has to just introduce himself/herself; the next one has to introduce the first one’s certificate and himself/herself; the third one will introduce the first one and the second one’s certificates and himself/herself, and so on. Through the activity, students are expected to be used to directive sentences and remember the vocabulary.

PART 9 --- Number, color and countable word

As students have learned and been familiar with number, color and some countable words, teachers could enhance the word structure and even add some vowel-initial vocabulary and its usage.

an / a / one + color + countable word
number(2-10) + color + countable word

The game would be quite easy for teacher to operate. Teacher divides students into groups, which would be better to be 3 students for 1 team, and number every one in each team; then teacher put word cards or just writes the vocabulary on the board, including the words of number, color and the countable words students have known. Next, teacher would call one of the teams comes to the front, and each of the members has to point out the words he/she hears. Teacher, beforehand, lets the members to decide which one would be going to find out the word of the number, color and the other kind, and they have to change the sequence next time. During the game, teacher limits the time when a team is finding the words. When the team in which all 3 of the members choose the right words in time, it will be added the point.

PART 8 --- Sentence about number

When students memorized the words of number, they can join another activity by using complete sentences and the vocabulary to express the number of the stuff.

number + countable noun
What is it?
It is a ____________.
What are they?
They are number + countable noun.

Teacher puts flash cards or draws the learned countable vocabulary and the number 1-10 on the board. The countable words should be placed in a zone and the numbers in the other part of the board. And students do the pair work and come to the front. When teacher say a sentence, such as “they are four birds,” then one of pair has to point out the number 4, and the other one has to point at the picture “bird.” Teacher gives a few seconds to let students to find out the words, and then calculates the score according to their performances. Later, teacher can mix those numbers into the words’ zone and play the game again in order to level up the difficulty.

PART 7 --- Number

This time, the activity covers the number. Teacher could start with units 1-9 and 10, and let students familiar with the number first. This activity could be used for students’ number memorizing, and be repeated for many times.

one / two / three / four / five / six / seven / eight / nine / ten

After teacher is sure that students have known the number, he/she could draw or put the flash cards on which printed the numbers on the board（that means number can be showed in pictures or words）. Next, students could be divided into 2 teams, and one of each team would be assigned to the front and hold the little bars（teacher can prepare other materials）. And first of all, teacher says a number and the 2 students should use the bars to point at the number on the board. At the meantime, teacher should watch out students’ safety standing in the front, and other students have to see which of the representatives the quickest one is.

PART 6 --- Flash card

Here, as students have learned another crowd of vocabulary, we could use the closed questions and the flash cards to play a game.

monkey / snake / butterfly / bird / flog
Is it a _________?
Yes, it is.
No, it isn’t. It is __________.

Teacher could make the class become 2 groups at first, and both two groups have to sit and face to each other. This game would be supposed to cover a couple of rounds, and teacher could decide which team goes first. For instance, if group A is assigned to give the questions, then it has the opportunity to get the point. And what the students of A should do is to choose a flash card and hide it from group B. Then each of the students of group B has to ask a closed question in order to guess at the name of the animals group A has, and vice versa. At this time, teacher has to count how many closed questions are given by each group on the board. The team which gives lesser question and gets the correct answers would be the winner.

Word Processor

We were taught to make use of Word Processor in Microsoft Office today. Word Processor is quite widely utilized by students all over the world, so I especially recommend being familiar with this program.

Putting images and links, making forms, and using TrackChanges are supposed to be simple but very helpful skills. Also, search for the meaning of the word and the same meaning or opposite meaning of a word are convenient for Word Processing users.

Word Processing activities are various. As the homework, teacher could make students to compose the articles with some pictures, and they can employ Word Processing function of seeking word’s meaning during their writing. Then later teacher check students’ compositions with TrackChanges and send them back via email. Besides, teacher could give students an incomplete article which may contain some mistakes, and then get students to just finish the article with TrackChanges and send it back. Teacher can also give students an article in which the vocabulary use is a bit superior to students’ English proficiency in Word at first, and let students find out the meaning of the unknown words with meaning-seeking function or to replace some specific words with synonyms. Furthermore, for the advanced-level students, teacher could request them to create a form in which should be put some selectable choices that people could use bottoms or marking to fill in this questionnaire.

Keeping our hands in Word Processor is one of the important techniques learners should know. It helps a lot!