Side by Side in China

[prephil]

Hello, my name is Phil. I'm from Ireland and I'm teaching in Hebei province in Shijiazhuang in China. I'v been teaching for three months and I now realise that my students can't actually use english very well. They can read it alright but that will only get them so far.

I'm teaching two different age gropus. One of the classes ranges from 5 to 7 year olds and we teach a book called Welcome to English (Publisher: Longman) and the main emphasis is to teach them to read. In the other class the students range from 10 to 12 years old and their doing a book calle Side by Side (I think Longman also publish it). As I am only a beginner teacher and as I have reltively little or no experience I have only now realised how poor their oral english is without book. I want to find ways to teach them how to use oral english in an interesting way. Sometimes I get them to close their books and I break the class into boys v's girls and ask them questions about a specific story and we might play x's and o's so if the girls get something right they can fill in an x and vica versa. It makes it a bit interesting but I feel the class is going stale.

What can I do? There are so many ideas on the net but I think their complicated enough and aimed at older age groups who have a fairly decent level of english. I want to keep things as simple as possbile. I have an assistant but she's not the best oral communicator in my opinion.

So if you could help me out I'd love you for it.

[monkeywrangler]

I am in my second year with my students. I have taught grades 1-3. I find the best way to help them improve their oral english is to ask the same question in different ways or give the same command with different phrasing. We use the Superkids books at my school and they come with vocabualry cards. If you don't have any cards, try making some on posterboard. The blackboards in my school are magnetic, so yours might be too and you can post them on the board during class. I put the vocabulary cards spaced out around the room and ask the students to "find" or "bring me" or I say "I need" a certain card. Also, ask questions that will make them laugh and uses vocabulary from previous units. During the clothing unit for first grade I would ask questions like "Can monkeys wear dresses?" or "Who can wear a skirt?". I also play a jeopardy like game which I call "pass the bottle". You give questions different point ratings depending on their difficulty. I use 5, 10, and 15 point questions and require full sentence answers. The first student can be chosen by number and they choose the point range of the question they would like. When they are done they choose the next student on an opposing team. I split my class into three teams because they sit in three sections of pairs. I have around 40 kids in each of my classes. Some kids know their english limit and others always go for the 15 point question even when they won't be able to answer it. I also try to make them read from the board a lot and give written homework in the second and third grades. The written can be just writing the new vocabulary 3-4 times each or having to form question and answer pairs based on the picture excercises in their books. I give rewards to the students who always turn in homework. We have dialogues in each unit that the students have to learn and I usually try to make them use the dialogue concerning themsleves. Also, charades is good because you can ask what the student is doing and the class has to guess. I hope this helps.