Week 4

This week I am going to talk about the use of pictures in the EFL classroom. Like Scott Thornsbury mentions, our students all have different ways of thinking and acquiring knowledge. Students who have a strong spacial intelligence can really benifit from the use of pictures. I know that I am like this. When recalling a conversatin that I've had for example, I can easily picture in my head where I had that conversation which helps me remember other details about that specific conversation. So I'm all for including pictures in the classroom. 

In the past I have introduced new vocabulary with pictures by showing a picture on the screen together with the word in English. I would ask students to write in their notebooks what they think the word means in Hebrew and NOT call out the answer. With each slide I would repeat this request because as you can imagine they seemed to have been so excited with the lesson that they forgot not to call out. After we saw all the pictures we reviewed all the words and I confirmed the correct meanings. I found these images usually on Google but Pixabay has much better results. It might be fun to surprise the students by inserting a picture of the principle, the gaurd, or even one of the students with the help of this cool site called LunaPic.

The difficulty in teaching EFL (English as a foreign language) as opposed to ESL (English as a secnong language) is that the environment that the students are in all day long is not one that speaks the new language they are learning. When a student exits the classroom they probably won't hear English again till the next lesson (assuming they didn't do their homework :) ).

Scott Thornsbury talks about a Linguistic Landscape.This view changed my perspectiveon EFL. He points out that there is English everywhere! On street signs, shop signs, logos and more. We just have to train our students to look for them! I think that a good idea for younger students, when introducing the alphabet would be to ask them to take a picture (if they have a phone)or write down, a word that starts with the letter being learned that they find on the street. I think that this can keep the learning going even outside of the classroom!