esl coursebooks

[joruss]

Hi
I have just started teaching esl in an international school in India. Could anyone recommend a good course book. I am teaching a mixed ability/age class grade 3-5.
Any help would be welcome as at the moment I am designing all lessons myself from free downloads etc and would like some more structure to work from.
Jo

[Sally Olsen]

If you can attend an ESL teacher's conference, wait until the last moment and some of the publishers or their representatives will have deals on a course books. Buy as many as you can afford and take anything that is free. Then you can pick and chose between styles and theories to find what suits your situation.

You can also write to publishers for free copies and see what happens.

I also suggest finding out what series is used in ESL courses in your local university and try to get the children's version of that series.

The best courses are made as you are doing with the students in mind and their background and culture represented.

I just went to the local booksellers and bought English books of Mongolian or Greenlandic or Japanese tales. The children already knew these tales in their own language. I got them to tell me the story as best they could in English, recorded this on my computer in Notebook. It seemed that we simplified the story that was written down in the book but at least I knew the gist of the tale as well from reading the more complex version.

I then copied the pictures of the book and typed out our story underneath and had a nice book they could usually read.

We then broke it down for grammar lessons and built it up with different versions of a sentence that added adjectives, changed verbs and enhanced the nouns, etc.

We wrote dialogue and did puppet plays or posed the children in various scenes for a storyboard that helped us to make a small movie.

The children performed this play or showed the movie to others, and their parents, other students and teachers see them speaking English which seems to be a great motivator for others to follow along.

[Dale]

Hi Folks!
What are the best materials/books etc to use for kids between ages 5-7 and ages 8-10 and ages 11-13. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated as we normally only deal in adult or business classes and we aren’t exactly experts when it comes to nippers. Also, I don't have any time to devote to cutting and pasting material to suit their needs I just need stuff that's ready to go and I have to say that (with the exception of the Grammar Time series) a lot of what's out there on the internet looks pretty lame. We need material that's easy to use for teacher and student alike.
Cheers
Dale

[Sally Olsen]

I liked "Let's Go". I got the children to buy the Picture Dictionary and we did all sorts of things with it. We bought the phonics book as well and made puppets out of the characters. I also like Jazz Chants.
http://www.oupcanada.com/esl/k-12.html

[Dale]

Thanks a bunch Sally. I'll look into it.

[lmojica]

I have been teaching Special Education for over ten years. I am taking courses to earn my Bilingual/ESl certification. For what I have observed, Teaching ESL is much like special education. You have to expose the student to different learning style. You can utilize all five senses; such as hands on activities, visuals, tactile activities and songs. Good Luck

[Sally Olsen]

It is amazing how close Special Education students are to ESL learners. They seem to hit the same barriers at almost the same time in their learning. It is too bad we can't use Special Education techniques in all classes with all students. Classes of any type need input in various ways for sure. Some of the materials work with both but it depends where it has been developed. A lot of the special education material is meant for North Americans but can be adapted of course.