How Should English Foreign Language Be Taught?

How should English Foreign Language be taught?
This essay contains my reflection on how English as a foreign Language should be taught. I am going to write some strategies, techniques, and ideas of how to teach English, what can make a successful teacher, and about the class management according to some authors and why I agree or not with them. I think that the culture should be part of theteaching, so I will mention that deeper latter, and last but not least I will write some words about the teachers´ heart.
First at all I am going to give my opinion about the topic. According to my experience I can say that English should be taught in a dynamic way I mean the learners and the teacher need to be active in order to have an entertained class because I think in this way the studentslearn easily, they are practicing the language and at the same time they are learning.

(Davies, 2008:17) says in his book:
“Is important to remember that learner needs to be able
to do more than just remember and repeat new items;
they must be able to use them actively to communicate”
(Davies, 2008:17)

I agree with Davies because I consider that learn aforeign language is better when you practice the knowledge in real life, I think it is meaningful for the learner while learning the language by remembering the information could be boring. Maybe it depends on the learning style of each learner, not all the students learn in the same way, some students can learn by repeating and memorizing the learning and other learn by practicing it.

Althougheach learner has their own learning style there are some elements which need to be present in a language classroom to help students to learn effectively.
According to Harmer (1998) the three elements are:
• Engage: this is the point in a teaching sequence where teachers try to arouse the students´ interest, thus involving their emotions.
• Study: study activities are those where the students areasked to focus in on languages (or information) and how it is constructed. They range from the study and practice of a single sound to an investigation of how a writer achieves a particular effect in a long text.
• Activate: this element describes exercises and activities which are designed to get students using language as freely and ‘communicatively’ as they can.

The learners could be muchmore motivated using these three elements. Sometimes they need to be motivated in order to they be interested in the class. The elements are useful and they guide you to teach in a better way, but it will depend on how you manage the activities. As I mention before, what I think is that putting in practice the new learning you can make it more meaningful.

To practice English in the class and togive better teaching, Davis (2008) mentions some teaching ideas which are:
• Demonstration with actions and objects.
• Gesture and mime.
• Paraphrase.
• Translation.

I consider these ideas good to teach a foreign language because they can make the class more interesting and students can understand better the topic.

I have an experience related to the first point (demonstration withactions and objects). I attended a class where the teacher presented a topic with real objects. She presented ‘clothes’ and she brought her clothes to the class to teach us the vocabulary and it was interesting because some of my classmates passed in front of the rest of the group and they wore those clothes. In my case, I learned the vocabulary faster maybe because I am visual and the objects werereal.

Elicitation, gapping and extending to adapting are three stages for activating Techniques according to Jordan (2009). He defined each one as the following:
• Elicitation: is the process of drawing out something, of provoking a response.
• Gapping: it refers to the authentic purpose for communication: transferring information, or bridging the gap, from one person to another.
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