VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: [1], 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 20:44:59 06/13/07 Wed
Author: Lindiane
Subject: Task 4

Giving Instructions


You are in the classroom, excitling explaining to your students an activity that you created yourself just for this lesson and that you personally believe it to be great. After telling the students how the activity should be proceed and that they will need to stand up to arrange themselves in groups, you look at them and wait. Obviously, you expect them to stand up and move but instead, they just keep quitet staring at you looking puzzled and sitting still on their chairs. From this moment on you realize that the activity will never work out as you imagined, and a feeling of frustration for all the time and creatitvity spent on it overcomes you.
The role of giving instructions is fundamental in the classroom: they will give students the support and the objective for the activity they are going to perform. It is therefore of primary importance that students understand well what they are supposed to do, so that the activity they are engaging will be fruitfull for their learning. In fact, when students do not understand the instructions they are given a lot of problems start to come up: they will feel insatisfied with themselves, they willl not be able to perform the activity and they will see no piont in doing it. In short; instead of achieving positive results in leaning students will create an obstacle for it.
Jeremy Harmer in his book How to teach English says that teachers should adapt their language to the students. It is important especially if they are in low levels of learning because probably they do not have enough vocabulry to understand the teacher if he/she uses the language as he/she would do with students of higher levels. The author makes a comparison between the way a teacher talks in the classroom with his/her students, and the way a parent talks to his/her child. He mentions that the parent changes the tone of voice, uses “less complex grammatical structures”(p.3), restricts the vocabulary and makes effort to keep eye contact. Teachers also make these kinds of simplification of language in order to facilitate students’understanding of instructions. For this reason Jeremy Harmer establishes two rules for giving instructions: “they must be kept as simple as possible, and they must be logical” (p.4). He adds that teachers should check if students understood the instructions right after giving them.
Concluding, besides there is no kind of recipe which teaches teachers how to give instructions it is possible to approximate to a better manner to give instructions in classes. In this manner, with a more appropriate way of instructing students it is quite possible to has less time spent with instructions and students and teachers are going to benefit from a more relazed environment in the classroom. In addition, teachers are going to be more confident among students and viceversa. For such reason the class will function in a dynamic and satisfactry process where teachers and students take advantage of the lessons as productively as possible. Finally students will focus more on the learning process of the language itself rather that worrying about wheterher they are doing the task correctly.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]
[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.