Teaching Preposition Using Games

English Preposition Games - For many students of English, preposition is an easy material to learn. So easy is it, that they think they don't need any explanation from the teacher. What they need to do is just to open the dictionary, look up the meanings, and memorize them. This view is true for many, but not all, students. Some students, no matter how little their number is, still need teacher's explanation and instruction. Some students even depend on teacher's explanation very greatly. Without teacher's instruction, or perhaps, demonstration, they just can't understand the material thoroughly.

Related to that fact, we, teachers of English should view the material and the students in clear perspective. Eliminating the material from our English teaching and learning plan will be unfair for the later group, those who need teachers' instruction. Meanwhile, teaching the material, preposition, in a conventional way will make the first group bored. The solution for this is for teachers to keep teaching the material while at the same time make those the first group feel involved. And to achieve this purpose, using game to teach preposition is the wisest choice. But, what kind of game I can use to teach preposition? That's the question which may echo in your head. Well, if you are looking such game, then I hope the following game, "do what your teacher says" game is applicable in your class.

Game Properties
Well before I explain how to play the game, let's us first enlist and learn about properties of this game. By the phrase, I mean any learning aspects which the game has and anything required to play the game. This includes objective of the game, language focus of the game and materials needed. To be short, the game is intended to practice English prepositions. The language focus of the game is simple one or two words preposition especially prepositions of location including in, at, on, under, above, below, next to, behind, in front of, beside, etc. Meanwhile, the materials needed in the game are students' learning instrument such as book, ruler, pen, bag, pencil, eraser, drawing book, calculator, etc.

How To Play The Game

For the sake of clarity, I'll break down the game to steps:
Step 1
The teacher prepare the students for the game. S/he should have told them to bring materials needed. Students should understand what they should bring.
Step 2
In this step, the teacher explains about preposition. The explanation should be made as short as possible. However, s/he should make sure that the students understand the function and meaning of prepositions.
Step 3
Assume all students bring all materials needed in the game and they have understood the meaning and function of each preposition. In this step, the teacher tells the students about what they are going to do, namely playing preposition game. S/he also explains the properties of the game.
Step 4
The teacher begins to explain the rule of the game. The students should understand, with teacher's explanation, that they will have to practice teacher's direction. When the teacher says "Put your pen UNDER the book!" for example, they should move their pen and place it under the book. All students in the class should do it together. There is a time limit. Students who could not do the direction in the specified time, then they are out of the game. If they mistakenly practice what teacher says, they are out. The winner is the student who could practice all teacher's direction up to the end.

p.s.: The teacher should prepare as many directions as possible. Over time, the direction should be made more complicated and involve more prepositions. To discriminate the level of students' attention, it is recommended that the teacher use variation of voice speed.

Well, that's a game which can be used to teach preposition. If you have your own games to teach preposition, feel free to share here.

Aspects To Consider In Teaching Writing

How to Teach Writing - Many English teachers get frustrated when they have to teach writing skill. They are often confused about how to teach writing skills effectively and efficiently. However hard they have tried, at the end of the semester, when they see the students' test result, they will usually frown. They are disappointed. Their students fail to fulfill their expectation. Finally, if not blaming their students of being lazy to study, they will blame themselves of not being able to teach writing skills.

Are you one of those English teachers? If yes, then you must arrive here with the expectation to find proven teaching writing strategies which will be very helpful to your duty as a teacher. Well, you may find teaching writing techiques that I've written here and here useful. Hopefully! But, keep it in mind that always depending on techniques made by others to help you cope with the teaching and learning problems you find in your classroom is not wise. Why? Because each class is unique. There are no exactly two similar classes in the word. As a result, techniques proven effective in one class may be found less effective in your class. Therefore, you need to create your own teaching techniques to cope with problems you find. If the technique you create does not show expected result, revise it untill you get what you want.

In relation to teaching writing skills, there are some important aspects you need to consider before creating your own teaching techniques. If you could consider those aspect and adjust the teaching techniques/strategies you are going to create, then the result must be satisfying. In contrast, if you fail to adjust them to your techniques, then there must be weaknesess in the techniques. The aspects are as follow:

1. Students' Level of education.
It is very crucial aspect which will affect the effectiveness of your techniques. You should pay great attention to whether your students are in elementary schools, in secondary school (junior and senior high schools), or in university. If the technique is not appropriately adjusted to students' level of education, then the product could be too easy or to difficult for the students.

2. Students' level of English mastery
Let's say that your students have not understood well about basic English grammar and they don't have sufficient repertoir of English vocabularies. But you assign them to write about their holiday experience. Of course, your students will not be able to do just like what you expect. With this kind of students you should assign them to complete sentences with appropriate words.

3. Types of assigned writing
By this aspect, I mean you should pay attention to kinds of text your students will have to produce: narrative, descriptive, expository, persuasive, argumentative, procedural, essay, resume, creative, or summary writing. You need to consider this because different kinds of text needs different teaching techniques. It is not effective, or even meaningles, of course, to use picture of series of event in your teaching when you actually want your students to write description about one prominent figure.

Well, that is the list of aspect you should know and consider while creating your own teaching writing techniques. I believe, over time, the english teaching and learning activities in your classroom will improve once you are able to create your own teaching techniques/strategies.

English Personal Pronouns

English Personal Pronouns - Before we, teachers of English, could help our students understand English personal pronouns appropriately, we ourselves should first understand well everything about English personal pronouns. If we don't have very good understanding about this subject, it's impossible for us to help our students learn this material. In this article I will discuss important things we should know about English personal pronouns. I believe all of you, English teachers, have understood this material very well. Therefore, let's treat this article as additional reading.

Scope of Discussion
In this article I will discuss only some (not all) aspects of English personal pronouns. They include personal pronoun definition, personal pronoun list, personal pronoun function, and personal pronoun reference. For the sake of clarity, I'll try to add personal pronoun examples in sentences. Of course, if after reading through this article you still don't get it well, you are recommended to ask some questions in the comment box.

Well, here we go

Definition of Personal Pronoun
Basically, pronoun is defined as the words in English which can be used to replace nouns whose identity is made clear earlier in the text. Departing from this definition, we can define personal pronoun as words which can replace nouns of persons.

Personal Pronoun List
Generally, there are seven personal pronouns in English. They are I, You, They, We, He, She, It.

Personal Pronoun Reference
Since personal pronouns stand for nouns of person, they can be distinguised by person. First person refers to the speaker(s) or writer(s) ("I" for singular, "we" for plural). Second person refers to the person or people being spoken or written to ("you" for both singular and plural). Third person refers to the person or people being spoken or written about ("he," "she," and "it" for singular, "they" for plural).

Personal Pronoun Functions
In a sentence, personal pronouns may have four different functions. They are as subject, object, adjective, and possessive. Unlike English nouns, which usually do not change form except for the addition of an -s ending to create the plural or the apostrophe + s to create the possessive, personal pronouns (which stand for persons or things) change form according to their various uses within a sentence. The following is the list of personal pronoun functions and their forms:

Subject	Object	Adjective	Possessive
I	Me	My	Mine
You	You	Your	Yours
They	Them	Their	Theirs
We	Us	Our	Ours
He	Him	His	His
She	Her	Her	Hers
It	It	Its	Its

Well, the above are some important aspects of English personal pronouns teachers should know. Hopefully, this article could be useful for you.

Teaching Basic English Personal Pronouns

Teaching Basic English Personal Pronouns - As with prepositions, English personal pronouns are easy for English teachers to teach and for students to learn. To master their usage properly, higher level analysis is not needed. What students need to do is just memorizing. If they could memorize the materials well, then they will be able to use them correctly. The only possible difficulty that students may face while learning English personal pronouns will come from the slight difference between personal pronouns in Bahasa Indonesia and those in English. However, if you teach this material using appropriate techniques, I believe such difficulty will not be a big deal.

Well, if you are looking for technique to teach English personal pronouns, the following may be helpful to you:

Material: personal pronouns (he, she, they, we)
Personal pronouns I and You seem not to pose any confusion to students, therefore both are not the focus of this technique.

Teaching Steps
Before you come to the main activities of instruction, first you should give clear explanation about the pronouns which will be used in the activities namely he, she, they, and we. The explanation should cover the reference of all those pronouns (he refers to one man, she to one woman, they to more than to people, and we to I plus other persons). In the end of explanation the teacher should ask the students whether they understand his explanation or not. If they still don't understand, the teacher should explain again.

After the explanation is given, and students have sufficient understanding about personal pronouns to be discussed, it's time to proceed to the main activities. Here, the teacher asks some students to come forward. Those students should consist of at least one girl, one boy, and two girls or boys. The teacher then gives different labels to each of them. For the girl, he gives her "She". For the boy, "He". For two girls or boys "They".

After that, the teacher gives the instruction. The instruction could go as follow:
To students who wear label, he says "I will read a sentence containing a name or names. Anytime I mention a girl name in the sentence, you who have label "she" should raise your hand so that all your classmates can see you. If a boy name that I mention, you who have label "he" should to the same. And if I mention more than one name, then you who have label "they" should raise your hand."

To other students, he says "I will read a sentence containing a name or names. Anytime I mention a name or names, your friend with label will raise their hand. And you have to repeat my sentence but you should replace the name in the sentence with the label they have."

After students show understanding about the instruction, the teacher can proceed to the show.

Well, that is one of techniques I usually use to teach my students English personal pronouns. So far, the result is satisfying.

English Preposition Games

How To Teach English Preposition - English preposition is basically one of the easiest to learn English material. It is not difficult because its structure is not complicated, its meaning is clear, and its form is fixed. If there is a difficulty with this material, it could be because the fact that for some prepositions its meaning in Indonesian language is not only one. Take, for example, preposition 'before'. In English this preposition may refers to time or location. When it refers to time, before is translated into 'sebelum' in Indonesian language. If it refers to location, however, before is translated into 'di depan'. This is of course a minor difficulty compared to difficulty found in other materials.

However, being easy to learn does not necessarily mean being easy to teach as well. In fact, assuming that student could understand the material about preposition themselves, teachers often forget to give sufficient attention to this subject. As a result, students often get difficulties with the material and finally fail to use preposition appropriately. This condition is understandable since however easy a material is, students still greatly depends on teachers' instruction. In other words, material about preposition is easy to learn only if it is appropriately taught by the teacher. Therefore, teachers need to teach preposition in a way that both helps students understand the material as well as encourages them to practice it so that they could store their understanding about preposition in their long term memory. To achieve this goal, I usually use games. And one game I recommend you to also use is the one called "Find The Person".

As the name implies, the objective of this game is for students to find someone using preposition and the clues. To narrow the scope of the game, the preposition involved in this game is only preposition of location such as front of, between, behind, next to, near, beside. For other prepositions, I use other games which will be discussed in the articles to come. Be patient :)

How Is The Game Played?

Preparation: On pieces of paper, the teacher writes instructions containing preposition in it as many as the number of students in the classroom. He also makes flash cards of prepositions which will be used in the game.

Before the game begins, the teacher shows and discusses all the preposition which will be used in the game. The meaning of each preposition is explained. For the sake of clarity, the teacher may practice all the prepositions. For example, he may write "Amir is behind Budi" then he goes to Amir and say the sentence again by pointing out where Amir is and where Budi is. "It is Amir, and it is Budi. Amir is behind Budi." After all prepositions are discussed and students understand their meaning, it's now time for the game.

Here we go!
Firstly, the teacher asks the students to sit on their seats. He then gives a piece of paper written with a name to all students. Each student have to get a name. This name will function as their fake name during the game. For example, there is a student named Budi and he gets a paper with Thomas on it. So during the game he uses Thomas as his name instead of Budi. (Caution: no student may know the fake name of other students).

After all students have received their fake names, the game can now proceed to the next step. In this step, the teacher gives a piece of paper to all students. One student must receive one piece of paper. The paper contains an instruction to find someone. It contains a clue, namely a preposition, to find that someone. The instruction may read like this: “Please find Thomas. He sits in front of the teacher.” When all students have received their instruction, the teacher begins to explain the rule of the game: "You have to do what the instruction you have says.” Because no student knows where someone is, the teacher must organize the instruction in such an order that one instruction provides a clue to another instruction. As for students, they have to pay great attention to each instruction which is worked out and solved by all their classmates because the instruction they have can only be worked out and solved correctly if they get clues from previous instructions.

After all students have received their instruction and understand the rule, the teacher begins the game. He must follow the order of students’ turn he has made before. When the game is going, it may go like the following:

Teacher : Budi, read your instruction and do as it says
Budi : “Please find Thomas. He sits in front of the teacher.”

(Budi then stands up and walks to Thomas by following the instruction. When Budi goes to the right person, the teacher says “Correct!” If the person is wrong, he says “Incorrect, try again!” and Budi continues looking for the person written in his paper until the teacher says “Correct!”)

After Budi solves his instruction, the teacher asks another students whose instruction contains a clue namely Thomas.

Teacher : Faza, read your instruction and do as it says.
Faza : "Please find George. He sits behind Thomas."

(Faza then walks to the person he is instructed to find until he find the right person).

This session goes on and on until all the students work out the instruction they have in hand. Each time, the instruction involves more and more preposition. In the end of the game, it is expected that the students understand the meaning and usage of preposition used in the game.

Well, that is the game I think effective to teach prepositions. If you have different ideas to teach English preposition, please don’t hesitate to share your ideas here. As a final remark, have a fun English Teaching and Learning Class.

How To Teach Noun Phrase

How To Teach Noun Phrase - Among other English structures, noun phrase is one that non English speakers find difficult to learn. For Indonesian students, the confusion is caused by the different structure of English noun phrase and Indonesian noun phrase. In Bahasa Indonesia, noun phrase consists of a noun and an adjective, in which the noun precedes the adjective. Meanwhile, in English a noun phrase consists of a noun and an adjective in which the adjective precedes the noun.

This very simple different structure of Indonesian and English noun phrase in fact presents very great difficulty for Indonesian students to learn English noun phrase. It is understandable, though, since the first language structure has been deeply absorbed in students' mind and telling them the difference will not make them necessarily able to use the structure appropriately. Therefore, in order for Indonesian students to understand and hence use English noun phrase correctly, appropriate technique to teach noun phrase is highly needed. Of course, there are many techniques to teach English noun phrase available. However, not all techniques are applicable and effective. Therefore, the paragraph that follows I will explain one technique that I feel very effective.

Here we go.
But wait, before we discuss the technique, you should know the media that we will need: pictures and list of adjective and noun.

Here we really go :D

Teaching Technique In Practice
The first step of the technique is called exposure to parts of noun phrase. In this step, the teacher shows several commonly used adjectives (recommended). After showing the adjectives, the teacher reads the words aloud and asks the students to repeat every word the teacher reads. After that, students are asked to guess the meaning of each word. If they don't the meaning of certain words, they are asked to look it up in the dictionary. After the students know the meaning of all words, the teacher then shows several nouns. As with adjectives, here the students also have to repeat after the teacher and look up the meaning of each word they don't know in the dictionary. When this is finished, the teacher proceeds to the next step.

Assuming that students have been familiar with the adjectives and nouns discussed previously, in this step the teacher shows pictures representing certain adjective and noun. ( For example, pictures about a beautiful girl, a friendly man, a green book, an old woman, etc.). The students are asked to match the pictures with adjectives and noun discussed previously. So when the teacher shows a picture about, let say, a beautiful girl, students will say "girl" and "beautiful" or "pretty," whatever they remember.

After all pictures have been shown and all related words (adjectives and nouns) have been mentioned, the teacher writes incomplete phrases describing several pictures. He may only write the noun and leave the adjective blank or he may write the adjective and leave the noun blank. (For example, the teacher may write "a ....... girl" or "a beautiful ...." to describe the picture about the girl). The students are asked to complete the phrase with the words discussed previously. When all the blank have been completed, it’s now time to proceeds to the last step which is also the testing step.

The last step is almost similar to the previous step namely showing several pictures and asking students to complete the phrase. In the testing step, the students are also presented with several pictures (of course, ones which have not been used as exercise in the previous step.) After being presented with pictures, students are also asked to describe the pictures. The only difference between this testing step and the previous one is that in the testing step students are not asked to complete phrases. Here what students have to do is to make phrases (from the scratch) describing the pictures. Of course, students what to make a correct phrase describing the pictures, they have to remember the words discussed in the first step as well as the phrase structure presented in the second step.

Well, that is the technique I use to teach English noun phrases. So far, I find the technique effective and the result satisfying. However, if you have other techniques to teach English noun phrase, don't hesitate to share with us by giving comments. Finally, have a nice and fun English teaching and learning in your classroom.

Teaching Writing Using Five Little Words Technique

It's widely known that among other English skills, writing is the most difficult one for teachers to teach and for students to learn. The difficulty increases if you are teaching the skill to junior high school students, just like me :). When it comes to writing section, well, I should admit, I must prepare myself to not only spend much of my time reading the writing students made, but also to the fact that mostly their writing is grammatically incorrect.

If you are anything like me, I am sure you must wonder about what you should do to help them write better and hence help yourselves spend less time to correct their writing. As a matter of fact, examining students' work is the most uninteresting part of teaching profession. Well, if you are among teachers I am talking about who are looking for strategies or techniques to help students write more effectively, the following technique I use in my class may be helpful. I name the technique "Five Little Words".

Five Little Words Technique Applied
I invented the technique while I was examining students writing in which I found that students tend to make more grammatical errors when they are trying to make longer sentences. When the sentences they made is shorter, the quantity of errors they make decreases significantly. Based on this finding, I assume that limitting the number of words in sentences students make will be useful to help them write better.

Following the assumption, I began to think about how many words each sentence should contain. Three, four, five, or six words? Initially I took three as the limit assuming that three word senteces consisting of subject, verb, object (e.g. I read books) are common and reasonable. However, I then thought that even though they are reasonable but such sentences not so natural since usually students write not about themselves but also about their relatives (My father read that book). More commonly, the subject and the object of sentences students made consist of more that one words. So, I decided that the most rational limit is five words consisting of subject (max, two words), verb, and object or complement (max, two words), hence I name it "five little words technique."

After the decision about the number of words in each sentence is made, it's now time to apply the technique in the classroom. The instruction I gave to students was as follow: "please write your experience in the last holiday. Remember, your sentece must consist of maximally five words, no more." Of course, since my students is at the early stage of English learning, meaning that they will not understand the instruction given in English, I translate the instruction to their first language.

The result? Well, it's magic. And you know what it means.

Teaching Writing Using Predicted Vocabulary Technique

Teaching students (especially those non English ones) to write is one of the most difficult tasks in English Language Classroom. No matter what level of education students are at, from elementary up to college students, when assigned to write, generally they will feel discouraged. It is not because they do not know what they want to write. It is because they do not know how to express what they want to write.

In case of college students, this may mean that they do not know the correct structure of the assigned essay (thesis statement, supporting ideas, etc.), they are just not sure about the correct diction which should be used. All of this will make students respond negatively to any writing assignment given by the lecturers.

In my case (remember, mine are junior high students), this mean that they do not know the words or vocabularies they should use to express what they have in mind. If they want to write about their 'visiting grandparents' experience, for example, they do not really know that they should use the words 'went, yesterday, last week, visited, arrived, rode, grandparent, family, etc' (remember, English is a foreign language for my students which means that they think in Bahasa Indonesia and then translate their thought into English). With this fact in mind, you may imagine how difficult it is to teach my students to write. Well, that's also what I thought when I first taught them. But now, that's not a big deal for me since I have invented and used a teaching technique which so far I think effective to teach students how to write. I call the technique as 'predicted vocabularies technique' or PVT for short.

Predicted Vocabularies Technique Explained
Before discussing how I used Predicted Vocabularies Technique to teach writing, let me first explain what it is. In PVT, students are given a task to write about particular topic. Instead of looking up the English words in dictionary by themselves, students are provided with words (pronoun, noun, verb, preposition, adjective, etc) which the teacher think are closely related to the topic given. What students need to do is just to write what they have in mind and use any appropirate words given by the teacher.

Predicted Vocabularies Technique In Practice
Even though this technique can actually be used in almost any type of writing text, I usually use this technique to teach writing recount text (text about students' personal experience). Here is an example of how I use this technique in my classroom.

The first thing I do is to choose appropriate topics to be given to students. One of the common topics related to recount text is Holiday. So I decided to choose 'spending holiday' as the topic which students should write.

After having the topic, I should predict vocabularies which students will need to write the text. And based on the topic given, I predict that students will need the following words 'last week, ago, went, arrived, with, etc.' With these words I predict, what students need to do is just to think about events they experienced in the past and pick any suitable words which I have provided.

About Me

Let me first introduce myself. My name is Faizun Qomar. I am a teacher of English. I am now teaching students of junior high schools. However, my experience includes teaching students from elementary school to university.

In this blog, I will share my experience in teaching english. Hence I am working in a quite remote area with students whose motivation is very low, then I will especially share my experience in overcoming problems appearing while teaching such students. Hopefully, this blog will be of use for me especially, and for you all. Happy reading!