English For Teachers #2 Classroom Language at School

 

CLASSROOM LANGUAGE AT SCHOOL ACTIVITIES

Teachers teaching subject through English find challenges on language expressions when they are talking to students, explaining a topic lesson, asking questions, giving feedback, giving instruction on assessment or doing evaluation on student’s achievement both oral and graph modes. In addition, they cannot mix or translate their language expressions. To meet their need in English communication, a set of habits and an ecosystem to reach the goal need to be designed well. A comprehensive activity should be executed to enable all members of school community practice and apply English in school areas. Whereas, teachers have big role to practice daily both in teaching and non-teaching activities. The support from other parties will encourage every teacher to show efforts and practice some simple expressions over and over again. The next strategic way is by focusing on places to be the point of English day practice such as canteen, library, teacher’s room, field, laboratory, headmaster’s room, parking lot and masjid. The key to practice the language is by practicing and applying classroom language (CL) and classroom instruction (CI) in daily activities.

The first action to be applied by the teachers is practicing classroom language in class. Teachers could explore different kinds activities to be their moment to speak up, explain, cheat-chat, ask and answer questions or to tell stories.  The other thing to prepare is a set of situation and CL as well as CI where teachers could check or refer the expressions they could choose from the simple ones. Practicing the expressions again and again could help their pronunciation better and their self-confident raised. Scheduling and time allocation will also keep them on discipline on speaking English when they do an activity. The most effective way to practice their English is starting from the teaching stages.

Classroom language (CL) is powerful strategic way for every teacher to practice their English in simple way. There are actually some different activities that can be done in class with different CL. In opening stage, for instance, teachers could do the greeting, socialization and praying. The phrases of “Hello, everyone!” or “Hi, champions!” is the simplest way to greet students, for example. Of course, teachers could give other variations on welcoming students. Other examples are, “How are you all today?”, “Everyone seems happy!”, or “You look sad. Is there something wrong with you?”. Simple expressions could trigger teachers to apply them in daily lessons, while the longer ones could be practiced later on when they have good self-confident to go further. Meanwhile, showing a procedure on cookery, for instance, could be a good moment to practice the CL. Moreover, other expressions on CL could be parts of teaching activities in Presentation, Practice and Closing stages.

Developing teachers’ ability in applying classroom language in class activities should be backed up with classroom instruction (CI) where teachers could give command language when the class are doing practice, production or assessment. As a matter a fact, the expressions used in CI has a slightly different from the CL. Teachers give some imperative sentences when they ask the students to open the book, the page of the book, share instructions on exercises or when they do the assessment. CI should be applied in simple sentences as students will catch what their teachers’ quests in a short time. The combination of CL and CI in class activities are good as long as teachers’ utterances are clear, brief and correct.

Teachers have challenges to teach subject and to deliver it through English. However, it can be good if the they know how to apply from the scratch. The two main focus on their language fluency is by applying CL for some time and continue to apply CI in lesson activities. Building teachers’ self-confidence also need support from other team by practicing English as well in daily work activities. This can become a habit and develop an environment where everyone will have roles to succeed the target of English activities at school. Teachers, students, school staff, headmaster and parents take part proactively to support and accomplish the goal on English environment at School. 

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