Collections of Professor Dr David Ngin Sian Pau

knowledge of being able to judge a person’s ability to speak, to read and to write English regardless of his or her age. He or she maybe at the age of 50s, but if his or her ability of using English is still beginner, he or she can study English with students of native English speakers who are still in kindergarten level. The only differences are their ages and thinking abilities. As long as the teacher can understand the two basic differences, he or she is going on the way to a successful career of teaching English. The following points and details are part of successful English teaching elements for primary level children.

·Structured play with letters and words               -students learning to read and write need a lot of
                                                                          exposure to letters.
·Use streamed English groups                            - work must be at an appropriate level if students
                                                                          are to do it successfully
·teacher reads to students                                 - weaker students can’t comprehend if they read
                                                                          by themselves.
·Model activities for students                             -students need to be able to see how pieces of
                                                                          text are constructed.
·Explain why students are being asked to do an activity -students need to see where they are going

·Act comprehension exercises occasionally             - students need to be prepared for tests.

Looking at teachers’ belief about motivation, it was interesting to see similar beliefs translated into different classroom strategies. At the primary level, the belief that the experience of successfully motivated students to keep working appeared in practice as a focus on individual improvement. Students were instructed to keep a record of their performance (e.g. number correct, time to finish an activity) and to strive to do better next time, akin to the personal best approach in many sports. With teachers defining success as personal improvement, it was students’ effort that largely determined whether they achieved success or not.

Teachers’ response were categorised in four ways: practices related to their epistemological beliefs; practices related to their beliefs about motivation; practices related to their belief about pedagogy; and attributional believes that were not tied to specific teaching practices. Of course there was some overlap among these categories, especially the motivational beliefs and the pedagogical beliefs. For example, teachers might get students to time themselves doing multiplication grids. This meant they were doing work at a level appropriate to their success, doing the quicker and quicker, would motivate them to keep trying.

Assessment is an extremely important and topical issue in the present time and it is one that is the subject of international debate. This is why assessment is fundamentally important. Developing ways of getting access to children’s current understanding is a crucial element of effective assessment, at the same time teacher’s self assessment on what he or she has done as a whole is what makes the teacher knows whether the type of English teaching delivery he/she made was successful. It’s about seeing the outcome of the teacher’s work that can increase the development of teacher’s teaching English methods, approaches, styles and this result lets the teacher understand whether his or her career of teaching English is worth and