What Age Do You Teach Present Perfect Tense

Creating Materials In my experience of teaching English, I think the most fun I and my students had was with created materials, or realia, used in conjunction with the planned lessons in the text. As a photographer, I had a number of images that could be printed out and used in games, for vocabulary lessons and also as a basis for dialogues created by the students themselves. An article about realia by Stefan Chiarantano (2005) describes using plastic fruit, toy animals, Christmas cards, maps and other items to introduce new vocabulary to his young students. Cultural items, such as the Christmas cards, can also be used to teach students about customs in other nations. They are often very curious about other customs and their very curiosity will improve their attention spans and help them...  [Read more]

Problems for learners in a Country of your choice: Italy In this paper I will address the issues I face as a teacher from the context of living and working in Italy, as well as the common problems my students encounter while learning and speaking English. I also want to draw attention to the input culture and society has on language, and look at how these factors influence dynamics within the classroom. Of course, it is nearly impossible to view ones self outside your own given cultural perspective, so as a result of this I will also be discussing my own assumptions on how I "imagined" people might act, compared to the reality of the situation. Often I neglect to take into account these differences, simply because I was raised in America, where I am used to a different set of cultural...  [Read more]

British english vs american English With English being recognised as the global language of choice, which one is considered the official language? So just how did American English diverge from British English in the first place? American English roots back to the early colonial days of the late 16th century, were a whole gamut of cultures converged into a single society. In some colonies English wasn’t even a spoken language and in those colonies that did speak English it was quite different from the English we know today. The Elizabethan English of the day consisted of many varieties of regional English dialects. All these different dialects, intermingled with a multitude of cultures formed one big boiling pot, of which over time, a new variant was produced – American English. And...  [Read more]