A Short Reflection On The Daily Esl Teaching

A Short Reflection On The Daily ESL Teaching

It is not a secret for us teachers that one of the hardest challenges of our job is making the students speak freely and spontaneously in theclassroom; sometimes motivation is not enough to have a positive student’s response, factors like peer pressure, shyness, self-confidence, lack of interest, etc, affect this relevant communicative skill.
Ifwe think about how little children learn and develop their mother tongue it makes us think immediately about how to provide the appropriate environment to the students in our schools and here it iswhere it must be addressed the concept of “Bilingualism”, it is necessary to bear in mind this word and what it means if we want to go beyond EFL and facilitate the school community with a total orpartial English immersion. It is my believe that the first step to take in this complex process is the “Student Cultural Language Awareness” in which as the students realize the need of their L1 tocommunicate in every social environment, they would be also aware of the necessity of using a second language at least at the school where they spend most or part of their time every day. There areunlimited oral communicative activities to carry out with the students but besides the above affecting factors, the grading system makes the students just learn by memory for the day in which the teacherevaluates an activity, call it interview, oral presentation, oral participation, role play, etc. so what else do we need to achieve our goals? qualified teachers? Hi-tech resources? a decent EnglishDepartment budget? all of them are crucial but if the students are not aware of the importance of the target language and do not assume a positive attitude towards learning, it will stick the process ofacquiring not just the oral but the other main language skills.
So this is our big challenge according to our local conditions of teaching a second language, where introducing a foreign language...