Teaching Techniques in English
For Teachers
Communicative Activities
Communicative activities create situations with information or thought gaps to encourage interaction. Participants explore what others think or know through interactive question-answer formats.
Conversation Practice
Teachers ask individual questions about students. Similarly, students can ask and answer individual questions about their classmates.
Cooperative Learning
Cooperative learning involves collaborative learning in small groups.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is a purposeful thinking and problem-solving approach, encouraging courage and fostering competition.
Dictation
Teachers read a text at three different speeds. In the first round, it is read at a normal pace for listening comprehension. In the second round, it is read sentence by sentence for writing. In the third round, it is read normally, and students check their work.
Discovery Technique
The discovery technique involves step-by-step exploration of grammar rules, allowing students to deduce both structure and meaning from context, fostering understanding without directly stating the rules.
Drama and Dramatization
Drama involves students bringing simple and mechanical language learned in school to life by adding personalities to characters and conveying a message. It encourages speaking, instills positive behaviors, and supports emotional expression. Students can act roles or use puppets and props.
Fill in the Blank Exercises
Students fill in blanks with new words or sentence fragments, often used for dialogue creation.
Games
Games are motivating, entertaining, and incentivizing, useful for preventing fatigue and distractions, especially in the final minutes of a lesson.
Jazz Chants
Jazz chants are rhythmic short poems and rhymes, suitable for repetition and reinforcement.
Jumbled Sentences
In this technique, sentences from a text or dialogue are presented in a mixed order, and students reorder them individually or in groups.
Antonyms / Synonyms
This technique aids word learning and assessment, often used in assignments and tests.
Minimal Pair
Minimal pairs consist of two words that are identical except for one sound, identifying differences that lead to changes in meaning.
Recognizing Cognates
Recognizing cognates involves words shared between two languages, either true cognates or false cognates.
Memorization
Memorization can be enjoyable when it involves memorizing proverbs, songs, and rhymes.
Miming
Miming involves expressing a message using body language, gestures, and facial expressions, often used in guessing games.
Question and Answer Drill
Question and answer drills can be used with pictures or flashcards for interactive practice.
Reading Comprehension Questions
Reading comprehension questions assess the level of understanding of a reading passage, including questions based on explicit information, inferred information, and personal connections.
Reading Aloud by Teacher
Reading aloud by the teacher can be done slowly with dramatic emphasis and background music or with students listening with their eyes closed to focus on pronunciation and intonation.
Reading Aloud by Students
Students can read aloud sections from a text, play, or dialogue, using different emotions (happy, sad, angry, etc.) to improve pronunciation.
Role Play
Role play involves students taking on specific roles and using the target language to communicate. They can write dialogues about the characters they portray, encouraging natural language use.
Self-Correction
Self-correction involves students identifying and correcting their own mistakes, either prompted by the teacher or through given choices.
Scimming and Scanning
Scimming (finding the main idea) and scanning (finding specific information) are efficient techniques for quickly locating information in a text.
Small Group Tasks
Small group tasks involve information sharing and activities conducted in pairs or small groups.
Songs
Songs are motivating, encourage language use, and aid memorization with repeatable choruses.
Storytelling / Story Reading
Storytelling and story reading stimulate imagination and curiosity, making it easier for students to understand and follow stories in English, especially when using picture books and cards.
Task-based Learning
Task-based learning begins with communicative activities without excessive focus on form. Students report on what they have prepared at the end of the task. Formal language features are emphasized later.
Total Physical Response (Using Commands to Direct Behavior)
Teachers give oral commands and have students carry them out, fostering understanding and compliance through physical actions.