Professor de Inglês!

I have read some texts about this topic and here there are a little of my opinion: ☺Kids need constant adult supervision. Starting early does not mean, per se, that the kid will be an assumption in English fluency. His personality, life experience must be taken into account, too.  ☺ I believe it contributes to the kid's overall development, making him more conscious about languages and different ways of expression. ☺ Usually people think that: the earlier, the better; the more input, the better (I also believe in this one);. But when they say "without English it is not possible to be successful nowadays", usually they think about getting a job and being rich and "successful". I think it could help, but I do not think only about the idea of knowing a language to attend other people expectations or the market expectations. I believe in growing and develop myself as a human being and a person. I want  to develop in students positive attitudes of openness to lingui...

I know that I must say "song" instead of "music" in a sentence like "Today we will listen to two musics". But kids associate "music" better with Portuguese. I make this mistake because a cognate is much easier for them to understand When I write the date on the board I usually say "March twenty three" rather than "March twenty third" because they know cardinal numbers not ordinal numbers. I make that mistake because of their previous knowledge.  I was teaching the 1st grade students the greetings, so to show them the written forms, I emphasized the pronunciation of the first letter: M for morning, A for afternoon and E for evening. But in Portuguese E sounds more like the E in the word “emphasis”. Sometimes, instead of pronouncing /'ivnin/ i do like /'evnin/.

I have read some very interesting texts in the post graduation course that I am attending. Here, there are two thoughts that I had during my readings that I would like to share. They are related to the idea of considering the native pronunciation as the only good one, and the idea of facing English as a lingua franca. Considering English as lingua franca means not having the native speaker as a model/example to follow. The number of people around the world that do not have English as their first language and can speak it is much more than the number of native speakers of English from any country. It means that the audiolingual method could maybe be considered old school (which does not mean it is ineffective; it just does not match the contemporary ideas of TEYL). Instead of American English or British English, we, Brazilians, maybe could say we speak International English, as a Chilean or Hungarian would speak, as we have different perspectives and way of expression than a native. And...

First week, all groups. This story I already told here.  I had planned a drawing activity for all groups. For 1 st  and 2 nd  grade, I asked them to draw what they wanted to learn in English along the year. For the 3 rd , 4 th  and 5 th , what they remember from the former years. They had to draw the vocabulary they remember. Those are very difficult to explain only in English and gestures. So I typed this instruction in Portuguese on Google Translate and clicked on the sound symbol, so everybody could understand the activity. For the next classes, I will try to plan activities that I would not need something like that to make them understand me.  March 31st, 4th grade 3, a class about numbers. One of the students said "It is very easy. Don't you have something more difficult?". I did not answer anything and he was already annoying me, cause he left the classroom twice and was talking too much. Then he told me that he did not know how to say 21 (twenty one)...

  4th grade I introduced the names of the sports in a previous class (the last 10 or 15 minutes), by playing hangman with them. So I used only cognates, not use any translation or explanation.  Then I prepared written material, with vocabulary and translation. The wordsearch was ok. It was easy for many students, but not so easy for a few of them, who do not yet know how to read lower case. This is one of the reasons that I always ask them to do written activities in pairs, so one can help each other (sometimes this help is like copying the other one’s answers). For exercise 2, they took more time to answer and they looked a little tired. Maybe I should have not done 19 items, but 12 or 14 max. For a 9 years old kid, it was too tiring. But I wanted to use the space I had on the paper, so I always use the max I can. Some students were really smart, and they knew that if they paid attention in a key letter, like the M in IGNROOMT, they would find MOTORING easily. But some of the...