Teach English in Xinpingbǎo Zhen - Datong Shi

In a English lesson, all students are more interested in learning through activities given by their teacher. Using flashcards ( FCs) is one of the most necessary and effective activity that can use for both adult and teenager leaners. According to wikipedia.org , a flashcard or flash card is a card bearing information, as words or numbers, on either or both sides, used in classroom drills or in private study.Flashcards can be virtual, as those used by flashcard software, or physical. Flashcards are easy-to-use and handy resources for teachers and they can be used on any class level and students in all ages. They are excellent for presenting vocabulary, drilling and repetition. For many students, using flashcards is a fun way to learn new vocabulary and grammar.A simple example of a flash card is a card with an image on one side and a word on the other, or a question on one side and an answer on the other. The language learner engages in a process of looking, remembering and testing herself until she can recall the word, or phrase, or question after longer periods of time, and this new language becomes part of the learner’s active repertoire. How to prepare flashcards? For the young learners, it is useful to make separate word and picture cards to widen the range of activities. Or words will be on the right side or under the pictures. For adult learners, it requires more information and more complicated, so your FCs could be a conversation combined with pictures that were drawn by yourself or coppied images from internet. Flashcards can be printed with different backgrounds and frames, in different sizes and fonts. “Headline” cards can be made when dealing with different themes. You can laminate the cards to make them more durable. How can you teach by flashcards? It is not so difficult task but requires more focusing on the lesson of both teachers and students. There are 5 of the following steps teacher can apply to teach the young learners. Firstly, teacher show FC with both word and picture by blending them 4 to 6 times while reading and playing its audio, you can tell students like this “ everyone looks and listens”, don’t forget to keep eyes contact with stdents to make sure students can see the picture and word. Then, repeat the vocabulary 3 times while the students listen only. The third step is choral drill, the students now repeat the vocabulary 5 times chorally as a class. After that teacher uses a guestures boby language to express the vocabulary and finally treacher chooses students at random to pronunce the vocabulary and corrects the students pronunciation. The card should be A4 size is an appropriate size. Letter on FC are in lower case, only proper nouns should be capitalized. Cards need to be clear, bright and fun. For adult learners, it is different from teaching young learners, teacher prepares FCs with the concept of the topics that you will teach. Teacher can show card with image and word and then ask them to guess the word meaning and how to use them and make some sentences with the word. Then choral drill the pronuciation and ask some students to repeat again. Or teacher can put all pictures on the board and asked students to tell the stories in the pictures. Card should be more creative and informative. Whydo flashcards work ? Flashcards work well because they help you to not only memorise facts quickly, but to process and store the information over the long-term.As language learning tools, digital flash cards do have a lot to offer. They are motivating and inherently challenging. It’s satisfying to see that we can remember new words.They can be visually memorable and can carry a lot of information for the language learner; for example, meaning, spelling and pronunciation features.Flash cards can be used for both receptive activities; where learners look and recognise the word, and also productive activities, where learners are required to say or use the word.Flash cards are ideal for recycling, or spaced repetition. You usually need to come across a new word a number of times before you can begin to remember it and use it correctly. There are many FCs activities can be applied in the class for both teenagers and adults( we can do searching this book of Veronica Gelfgren name “ Flashcards for fun” with over 150 ideas of using flashcards). For instance, in teaching vocabulary, we can use game “flashcard memory game – blind” : Place the flashcards on the table. Ask your students to look at the cards and then to close their eyes. Remove one card from the table. Tell the students to open their eyes and tell you which card is missing. For older students and for more of a challenge, increase the number of cards that you remove! This exercise is excellent to use for teaching vocabulary of specific categories, at all levels. In teaching grammar “searching for cards and practicing prepositions and past simple” : Hide the cards around the room; on top of things, inside drawers, under books, attach some to the wall etc. Ask the students to look around for about 5-10 minutes, and to write down what they find and where they found it, using as many different prepositions and verbs as possible. Ask them to read out aloud their answers about what they found. Example: I found a pair of black gloves in the drawer, I saw a parrot on the bookshelf, I picked up a cat from the pencil-case. Award points for every correctly used verb and preposition. To sum up, FCs is not the new teaching tool but it can help both teenagers and adults to learn English very useful and effective. And it also can make a plenty of fun games and interesting English lessons. Just use them to make our teaching and learning better and better !