Along a whole year, I have been doing my best devoting my time, knowledge and efforts to put multiple basic lectures together to get a beneficial program for my beginner students who were in fact teachers, doctors, engineers, and students of some different fields. “Beginners Club” has provided the right environment, a trusted program, and a workaholic teacher for tens of people who want to learn English well, following up dated methods of teaching foreign languages generally and English specifically. According to me, learning a foreign language is based on four main skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening; in addition to grammar, phonetics and translation.
My aims were:
To get rid of the archaic methods of teaching English, and replace them with fresh, new, bright, and funny ways of teaching that everyone likes.
- To provide a huge amount of vocabulary and language to help students communicate in English.
- To teach the students how to be an active learner and practice the four skills suitably. For instance: at the beginning of the session of reading, I used to ask some questions like: How to read? What to read? How to be a skillful student skimming and scanning texts, articles and books? At the end, students could feel familiar with reading, and it is not too late to start.
At the beginning of the session of writing I taught my students approximately all the pre-writing skills such as: free writing, listing, clustering and journalist questions. And not to let the students feel bored the practice was a funny story that we wrote all together.
How to be confidant? How to make your minimum vocabulary to express your ideas? How to imitate native speakers? How to be fluent in English? How to transmit ideas from Arabic to English correctly? How to think in English? The answers of these questions were enough for the beginners to talk without hesitation or fear.
In addition to what was mentioned above the following titles were among the favorite sessions:
Games:
Having fun while learning is among the most beneficial methods of teaching. Games such as Crosswords, scrabble… help the students to enrich their knowledge amazingly.
Proverbs:
Proverbs are of heavy weight in both speaking and writing: examples: 1- a penny saved is a penny earned. 2- A chain is as strong as its weakest link. 3- Actions speak louder than the words. 3- Keep your friend close and your enemy closer…
Idioms and Slangs:
Foreign speakers of English could not understand native speakers as they use idioms and slangs; that is why I devoted some time to teach my students the most used ones with the exact explanations, examples of idioms: 1- to break the wrong tree; which means to look for something or someone in the wrong place. 2- to lend someone your ears; which means to pay attention or to listen carefully. 3- to hit the bull’s eye; which means to rich the main point… examples of slangs: hang out: spending some time together. To chill out: to relax. My wheels: my car. To be amped: to be super excited…
Tongue twisters:
“In order to get rid of the twisters your tongue is suffering from, practice tongue twisters”. This was my objective behind dealing with more than 100 tongue twisters.
Oral sessions:
*Everyday expressions:
The goal of this lecture is to teach students English phrases (not just individual English words) that they can use in many different situations. The selected phrases are typical expressions used by native speakers.
I used to include small explanations about when to use the phrase and weather it is formal or informal. For instance: Phrases for apologizing: I should have… [ex. called you and told you I’d be late]. (formal)
ways to respond to an apology: Sure! (informal)
*Talk about a person’s life.
*Describe a person’s physical appearance, a person’s mentality and personality:
The students have learnt a lot of new vocabulary and have felt comfortable with such an easy topic.
Phonetics:
* How to read a transcribed word. The aim of this lecture is to help the students to know the right pronunciation of a given word by themselves using a dictionary.
*Discriminate between the final sounds: [s], [z], and [iz].[t], [d] and [id].
Translation:
It is something normal that Algerian learners of English are influenced by their mother tongue: Arabic, yet it is absolutely wrong to think in Arabic and write or speak in English.
Grammar:
*Introduction to the different parts of speech: verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and modals.
* The most used tenses: - The simple present tense.
- The present progressive tense.
- The present perfect tense.
- The simple past tense.
- The past perfect tense.
- The past progressive tense.
- The simple future tense.
- The conditionals.
* How to transmit a sentence from the active form to the passive form.
To sup up, “beginners club” has been the best world for everyone who wants to learn English correctly. After Allah’s will, dedication and love to the job I was doing, determination, patience, consistence, having faith and hard work were key items behind the success of my session.