MATERIALS NEEDED WHEN TEACHING ENGLSIH

Materials needed when teaching English

Language teaching is a very important process for the teachers. That’s why we should be very careful when choosing the materials needed for our students. We should try to choose the most appropriate way with the most appropriate materials for them.

English language teaching materials make it easy to access to success. They contribute so many advantages to the teaching process, mainly visual or audio ones.

Teachers should be aware of the fact that language teaching is not an easy task. Therefore they should choose those materials which make teaching process much more joyful and easy.

During our internship we had to deal with real classroom’s situations and with real students. We had to prove ourselves capable in what we had chosen to do for the rest of our lives. We are going to be teachers and as ones we should take care of every single detail that has to do with our classes and our students.

To be honest before starting the internship I had a lot of ideas in my mind. I was eager to try new things with my students and see if they worked. I had so many plans but unfortunately, after having my first two classes, I realized that it was not possible to do or accomplish everything that I had prepared for my students. Sometimes because of the limited time, sometimes because of the missing materials needed and sometimes because of other factors I couldn’t present my work to them the way I wanted and the way I planed. So I started to think of using materials which were cheaper and easier to find, like posters, pictures, drawing, sometimes I even carried my laptop with me so that we could listen to some tracks which were needed for the lessons.

If we want to improve our student’s speaking or listening skills, we should choose the right activity which consists of right materials and if we want them to understand the context in a play or something we should choose the activity that appeals to.

There we’ll see what kind of materials we can use to improve visual and audio skills of our students and how the materials contribute to the teaching and learning process.

Visually we can use “flash cards” and pictures in lessons, they are among the most frequently used materials in the second language learning. Flash cards have some advantages like: you can use them anywhere and they are easy to use and find because they are cheap.

Most of all with your flash cards you can create the right learning environment for you, whether it’s at your desk, on the sofa or in the classroom. Instead of just telling the names of the seasons we can show flash cards to the young learners and we can give them the chance to guessing the meaning and also we can play mini games about them. We can show flash cards to the students and make them guess the season. They can easily do that and when we say the English meaning of that time, it becomes more memorable. This will also improve their perception and the word that the student will acquire will be permanent.

The communicative method of teaching language requires the learner to be put in a situation that ensures that the communication need to be close to real life so “drama” is the key here to see the authentic material language on the stage. Improvisation is necessary because when we use realistic situations in our teaching the learner has to enter fully into what is happening and think of what should he / she do in the same situation. Therefore the improvisation is effective. From the very beginning stages of the learning process, even with a small range of vocabulary young students can improvise most unexpected dialogues.

Actually with the teenagers I didn’t practice drama but I would have liked to. We practiced role – play though. The students were a little surprised at the beginning, maybe because they were not used to role - play but after some practicing they really liked it and enjoyed it very much. Even the most passive students wanted to try it out and from passive they became active because they did not only learn their words and what they were supposed to say but also saying them with the right tone and intonation.

I always prepared some posters for them. Most of the time I used to draw different pictures, being good at drawing really helped this time, but there were even cases when I printed pictures for them to show. Those pictures were to illustrate the theme of the lesson that we were having, so we commented upon those pictures and we described them.

We even did our listening parts. I ensured the tape from the teacher and I took my laptop with me. They were enthusiastic about that, and therefore paid attention to the listening parts.

Even though it is very difficult to have all the materials desired for you lesson still I believe that a good teacher can find other ways and other materials to make his / her lessons interesting and fun for his / her students so as the learning process becomes easier for them.