Articles about education
Teaching EFL
Frustration

Previous section was Jewish Teaching

My method of teaching tries to eliminate the frustration among the students. By the time they actually read a passage, I like them to actually know what the passage is so that the reading a simple method of reviewing what they actually had studied. That makes the reading much more exciting and fun and it eliminates much of the frustration that already exists. It also means that there is a great deal of work to be that is involved before the actual reading itself.

I have to spend a great deal of time analyzing the material before I actually read it so that they will understand it. I do this without having material in front of the students and I use other methods such as taking some of the difficult words and defining them I their native language. In this case their native language is usually Hebrew. I then go on to the derivations of the words, especially when it’s possible to use these derivations in order to learn other words or other concepts. I go into commonly misconfused words, the words effective and efficiency are often confused in Hebrew for example. The same word yeilut is defined in Hebrew as being both efficiency and effective. So when I teach one I’m sure to teach the other one as well and I make sure that they understand the differentiations between them. I may go into some linguistic concepts as well or discuss the logic of the concept that is to be taught, I may try to elicit some of the content by using some questions which will lead them into the thinking or the method of the author. By the time I’m through with eliciting all this information, the reason itself becomes fun.

However, I realize that this is my own method and it’s not necessarily the method which can be used by anybody else. Although others might want to try it and to see how successful it is and perhaps adapt part of these ideas. Other details and other suggestions that others may have may be included in future articles if you let me know what you have done and how you have done it. My goal is again to make sure that the reading itself is fun and that it’s much easier once you once they already know the material they don't have I also want to eliminate the frustration and I don't want to analyze things after they’ve read it. I prefer to analyze it and this is a bit unusual before they actually read anything. The teaching is done before the reading rather than after the reading. The reading is just the simple climax for the material and this method is very often very successful because the students know just what to expect and what they have read.

In the past I taught a class in spelling and I used basically the same concept. I was able to turn I wanted to turn the spelling class which is really a boring subject into an exciting concept so the way that I did it was by getting involved in the words themselves, especially those which had interesting derivations which link them to other words so that the students would sit in the class breathlessly and were very happy to hear about all of the other concepts that they had no ideas about. They were most excited when several words which they knew were linked in some ways to each other and also they were happy when they found that words had Hebrew derivations so that they could link them to their own existing understanding and this changed it from a dry study of vocabulary or spelling to a live concept which they could relate to.

Other things another useful method with both spelling and even more so with English as a Foreign Language is to help the students to anticipate what they’re about to read by my leading questions I’m able to elicit positive answers to direct their conversation and their concepts so that they know just what will occur in the reading itself. This cuts through all of the other questions, details, problems that usually exist with most reading of foreign language texts.

Read more about EFL

Read more articles about Education

Find out about the Jewish Teaching Forum

Find out about other Education-related forums

Find out about other Jewish and Hebrew forums


Are you required to read this webpage for a course? Do NOT print out the article. It is copyrighted.
Your exercise for this article is as follows:

Click here for subject and title lists of articles by David Grossman

Copyright © David Grossman. World rights reserved. This article may not be printed, forwarded, reproduced, or copied in any way or in any medium without written permission from David Grossman.

Keywords: Frustration, Method, Writing
/GrossmanEd/EFL/Frustration