Earnest to gain vocabulary

The teacher will try to promote in his/her student the attitude to learn vocabulary, by talking with him or her, so that this student will get cheerful to find out how to say further things in English, to communicate with native speakers or practice new things with his teacher in the class. The teacher will try to provoke necessities of communicating new things in the class. It's like a game. A friend of mine, Francisco, is all the time eager to communicate with English-speaking people. Once we were in a plane of the British Airways, and at once he politely tried to speak with the flight-attendants. This person is willing to always learn new words. A person like that, with such an attitude, is the kind of person that wins the war of learning a language.

More about effort in learning English

"Mistakes are easy; mistakes are inevitable. But there is no mistake so great as the mistake of not going on." This was written in 1876 by Jex Blake, and I assure you it hasn't lost its value in our time. In Spain, my country, experts say that children today have more than ever before, but lack in receiving affecion and also lack in discipline and effort: everything is at hand just in a blinking of the eyes. Notwithstanding, as I proposed in previous posts, effort is crucial. That is, the firm resolution to do it, to learn English. That person, with that quality, wins the battle always, and the war as well. What is worth to gain, it implies effort. Best students enroll themselves in a program of a school or an academy, precisely to be exacted by a teacher. In my doctorate research I also used other terms that round up the concept of effort---think of them, because they constitute a nice program of education for the learner: willingness, energy, self-control, desires to communicate in the target language, self-involvement, initiative, responsibility, self-planning (Oxford 1990), studying, creativity, constancy, to intervene and participate in the class, autonomy, capability of intuition (Stevick 1989), discerning, perseverance, the more you dedicate to this process the better. Put in other words, Thomas A. Edison said:

"The three great essentials to achieving anything worthwhile are; first, hard work, second, stick-to-it-iveness, and third, commonsense."

OXFORD, Rebecca (1990) Language Learning Strategies. What Every Teacher Should Know. Boston: Heinle & Heinle Publishers.

STEVICK, Earl W. (1989) Success with Foreign Languages. Hertfordshire: Prentice Hall International.

Your students should use all the means!

All the means at hand! Studying, learning vocabulary and useful expressions, practicing them by using them in conversations and written sentences, talking with natives, losing fear to do so, trying over and over and making mistakes, reading readers or unabridged books, listening to a radio station on the Internet, watching movies... Let's tell them: You are so smart, you can't depend on me all your life, use the means, don't limit yourselves to what I teach you...

Want success at teaching English?

I'll try and post further factors of success in regard to both teaching and learning English. Right now I'd like for you to make clear that---from what I've found along my research in TEFL---the most important thing for a learner of Englisn or any other language is for him or her to really and eagerly and earnestly want to. In other words, what matters is the student's attitude: I know some people who have had success in English because they wanted to really learn! The teacher might be so concerned with teaching, not to sleep at night to prepare a big amount of material for his or her students, climb Sierra Nevada's highest mountain in Granada (Spain), however if the students don't use the means to learn English as their own motors and engines, not just as a dead weight, the teacher will achieve nothing or nearly. We've got to encourage our students, and motivate them, like you well know, as a class or better in individual and friendly tutorials. Thus those friends of mine tried to use all the means at hand and with imagination to acquire this language. When I start a program or a course of English, I say to my students, after the polite and kind introduction and such, "I'm not here to teach you English... (a great silence among them) It's you who come here to learn English, you are the protagonists of the class, I can't learn for you, it's you who can and should invest efforts to learn English", or something of the like, adding a friendly smile.

Most important: Communication

Our students don't learn English, or whatever language, just like any other subject: math, history, geography, literature... Yet we as teachers must help them become conscious they are learning a tool, and this one in order to communicate with the world. That very activity or exercise she has to do as homework, if the case, is a step farther on toward success in mastering the means of communication. Even more, the teacher can exploit the vocabulary or the grammar inherent to that activity as an activity of communication. The teacher both uses that language in her question and besides expects that language in the response. In that way, our student will realize that what he or she is learning is useful for something else! So the important thing in the class is to raise communication, though this might be from a zero level or nearly. And remember the necessary rapport with your students: sometimes an appropriate sense of humor helps more than a stern face look.