Learning English - Selecting The Teaching Material

I am starting a class to teach a group of orphans to improve their English Language. What I want to do first is to build up their vocabulary. As the class is only once a week, I would be tough for the students to show improvement within a short period.

To facilitate my teaching, I will be using a video. I think, my best choice is to use the material from Youtube. This week I find a video with a structured method to build up the vocab. It divide the lesson into words starting with sequence of alphabets.
I like the way the lesson is carried out. This is how the teaching is carried out... a. It starts with pronunciation, the students are given two chances to say the words correctly. b. The next step is giving the meaning, the video explains the meaning of the word. c. A sentence is given for each words. In using the video, I will take it slowly to give the students the chance to write and practice the words.

Teaching the Orphans 21 Oct 2012

On Sunday 21 Oct 2012, we went to our weekly session with the orphans. As the number of students were large, about 30, we had to divide the class into 2 groups, the boys and girls. I informed the caretaker that the session for the girls would be at 10 am and the boys at 11.15.

When I arrived, the boys were already sitting in the class. They were eager, but I had to send them back, as I wanted to keep to my earlier timing.

There was 12 girls, most of them were already in my earlier class.  I use my PC to play the video. However, the voice was to soft. I had tried it in my bedroom and I sound loud enough for me. However in the class, it was really soft.

Managing the boys' class was more difficult. Some were aggressive and like to disturb their friends.

For the boys, I took the simple approach. I wrote 10 sentences on the board with blanks space for them to fill up, example...
- my name is -----------
- I am ---------- years old.
- I was born on ........... 19....

Teaching English for an Orphans' Home

My daughter and I are starting a new project. We are conducting a weekly lesson for the orphans' home. I know that a lesson a week is not enough to build up the skill, but that is all the time that I have. I am working on the rest of the weekdays.

I am planning to have a least two different approach per lesson. One is passive and the other is active.

a. Passive - the students listen, the instructor teaches.
- example is - story telling, listening to video or tapes.

b. Active lesson - students perform some activities and learn while doing it.
- example, prepare a presentation and speak in public.

Tomorrow, I am using this video.

 

How I will using the video.

1. I will open it with a short briefing on the video and what they can do to make learning more effective.

2. They will listen to it for the first time, and try to understand it.

3. Then I will do a short pulse of the video and they are to the words and add it to their vocabulary.

These are some of the vocab..both words and phrase.

welcome  learning  why   reason  smaller easier reason   people rule

the phrases are..
- are you happy?  I hope so.
- try to relay
- strong foundation
- day by day
- no pain.... no gain

Malaysianized Your English

It is probably the right time for Malaysian to Malaysianize the English language used locally. After all, the British had done it without and fear or shame. So do the French, they are the worst of its kind.

Just look at the name of our town and cities, Singapura becomes Singapore, Pulau Pinang becomes Pinang. If you were to check some of the words such as amok, compound and atap. Not only did they change the names, the use their odd kind of pronunciation to speak to us. English is the international language, the number of English using is is minute, say less than 25%. There are more Indian who speak English than the British themselves.

So, I did saw the comment of the wrongly used English by Malaysian. This is what they say...
- Malaysians are using the word horn wrongly in their conversation. They are using "horn" as a verb, when it should be used as a nouns.
- Using the "follow" as in direct translation of the Malay word "ikut". As such the sentence becomes "I follow you" as in Malay " Saya ikut awak"