Teach English in Yinji Zhen - Liaocheng Shi

English as a Foreign Language classrooms should be a well structured and goal-oriented place. This means being able to teach the material in a time efficient and effective manner. However, if you were to approach lessons by treating your students like computers and trying to download the information into them you are not going to get very far. While certain things like spelling must be memorized, there are many ways to get your students wanting to practice their English in the classroom. Games and be used to elicit students knowledge of a subject, get them practicing speaking, and motivate them to learn. Games and activities in English classes are perhaps the most important tools you have at your disposal when trying to get your target language to stick. Games and activities can come in many varieties. They can be used at any point in a lesson if you are creative enough. For example, a lesson could start with a teacher putting the class into teams and playing a game of hangman. The teams would take turns guessing the letters and solving the puzzle. This would allow students to start remembering vocabulary from the previous lesson. It would also incentivize the students to retain the information if they knew there were prizes involved for remembering the material. While giving out prizes might seem more suited for younger learners, everyone likes to be praised and acknowledged. Although discussion seems to be what most lessons start with, I think students should experience other ways of opening a lesson to make sure they don't know what to expect and just go on "auto-pilot" during the lesson. Another creative way to get students to remember vocabulary from a previous lesson is to mime the verbs and see if your students can recall the vocabulary words you are miming. In my opinion, games are probably most effective in activate phases. The purpose of activating phases is to get students using English fluently and as naturally as possible. Speaking any foreign language can difficult especially when being examined by peers or the teacher as if it were some kind of performance. This is why games and activities are so good for the activate phase of a lesson. Students will be calmer and more relaxed when they are having fun, interacting with each other, and feel they are putting their English to use in a practical manner. For example, students could role-play a scene where one student pretends to be a waiter and the other a customer. The waiter will have to ask qualifying questions and the customer will have to explain what they need. In this exercise, students will be happy to practice their vocabulary because they know they will use their English like this in the future. When role-playing students tend to feel more comfortable and they do not have the pressure of having to improvise or feel like they have to "out do" their peers because the point of the exercise is to have fun. Even though games are meant to be fun, games are first and foremost meant to get students speaking English in a natural way. When implementing games in a lesson it's important to make sure that the games actually benefit the lesson. Games must get students using relevant vocabulary, allow creative space for students to make unique sentences, and done in a way that the teacher can make an observation about the progress of the students. Studying helps students learn new material but using that material in games is what makes students want to remember it. By strategically using games in a lesson a teacher can greatly increase student participation and overall enjoyment of the class. Therefore, I recommend that ever lesson plan includes some sort of activity or game that incentivizes students to use their English speaking skills.