The Place of English Language in Education

Language is a most important factor in general education because it is the crux of understanding. Throughout, the teaching process it is worthwhile to remember that teaching calls for a child-centered, honest, and healthy approach to language.

English Language

Again, language is a device for giving and receiving emotional responses - a function we in school often forget or limit to love for trees and flowers or to occasional bursts of patriotism.

But I am saying, for I believe it intensely, that present-day living and understanding of it comes first, and that usually we have taken a wasteful course by beginning with the past and its lessons.

Mental hygiene calls for a wholesome use of language. Schools do much to set up the opposite attitude. By the very nature of the school, its experiences become a standard of sort. Language used in school is characterized as “good” in contrast to language which cannot be used in school. By our taboo on sex words, on literature which deals frankly with life-experiences, and on discussion of love and romance, we set up inhibitions and false values. Only by discussing frankly and unemotionally vital matters can we develop individuals who use language adequately and without embarrassment….Our people use [language] timidly, haltingly. They fear to speak directly, call frankness vulgarity, fear to discuss love, beauty, the poetry of life. They ban honest words and prefer circumlocutions. The language teacher, the teacher of English, carries a goodly share of responsibility for the mental hygiene of young people, in reality.

As training for independent thinking and clear self-expression, how appropriate is it to ask children to punctuate bad sentences some textbook-maker has written, or to write endless papers on topics chosen by a teacher or committee?

Language is a most important factor in general education because it is a vital, intimate way of behaving. It is not a textbook, a set of rules, or a list of books.

Expanding Each Student’s Knowledge

The extracurricular activity offering must be divided into several groups or areas: Art programs, Athletic programs, Language programs, Robotics programs, and Guidance and Academic Reinforcement programs.

Student’s Knowledge

In the different art programs students can learn to play an instrument in a didactic yet fun way, stimulating their coordination, logical and cognitive reasoning and self-confidence through music. In these programs, students can learn how to play the piano, violin, guitar, drums, and more. In addition to playing an instrument, students can also develop their vocal skills through singing lessons, furthermore providing them with the possibility of joining their school choir. Another form of artistic expression that is promoted in these art programs is painting, which offers students the possibility to improve their visual observation abilities as well as their creative skills. Through these activities, students are able to learn elementary painting techniques, such as composition, form and color. In these painting classes, students learn how to create works using water color, tempera, acrylic, and oil or pastel techniques.

Extracurricular athletic programs reinforce the idea that playing a sport helps promote students’ personal development, social relationships, companionship and physical endurance. Our schools need to offer many different athletic options such as football, indoor soccer, basketball, padel, fencing, swimming, figure skating and rhythmic gymnastics. Students begin learning each athletic discipline from the very foundation and throughout the school year are able to learn the fundamental tactics and techniques of the sport they have chosen. In some cases, teams must be formed to participate in internal competitions as well as municipal or regional leagues.

The language programs need to focus on the learning of one or several foreign languages. The aim is to provide each student with the tools they need to express themselves in another language in the most fluent way possible. This can be done by strengthening the areas of grammatical, oral, and written comprehension and expression.

Students who participate in robotics programs are able to carry out individual and group experiments that utilize innovative robot design and programming activities that involve working with mobility and sensor communication. In addition, these courses focus on the relationship between software and hardware that facilitates the operation of robots.

Guidance and Academic Reinforcement programs allow students to review the topics they are learning throughout the school year as well as answer any questions they may have regarding the material they learned in class. A mental development course, which is aimed at children from five to thirteen years old, which enhances students’ intelligence through an educational program that involves calculation activities using an abacus, mental arithmetic and didactic games, benefits the students in a bigger way.

Developing Students Skills to Face Tomorrow

Skills such as resilience, communication, proactivity and leadership are just some of the areas that are essential when facing the challenges of this century's job landscape - but it’s not always clear how to teach these. Sustaining young people’s effort when facing big challenges and equipping them with the skillsets they’ll need to prepare for the unseen future is a significant task. But it doesn’t have to be a daunting one! Following this five step guide, it would be easy to support your students on their future career journey.

Developing Students Skills

1. Teach Collaboration as a Value and Skillset

Young people need new skills for the current and future workplace that will make them ready to collaborate with others, not only in their own classroom or workplace but potentially with others across the planet. Encouraging students to work together on a creative challenge, and allowing them to reflect on the learning’s they take from the exercise, will help them better understand what it means to be a part of an increasingly collaborative and connected world.

2. Build on Evaluation and Analysis

New information is being discovered and shared at an ever-growing rate. Predictions show that 50percent of the facts students are memorising today will no longer be accurate or complete in the near future. Students need to know not only how to find accurate information, but also how to critically analyse its reliability and usefulness. Building research-based tasks and projects into your teaching will provide a basis to develop this essential 21st century skillset for work. Why not try the Life Skills   to get students thinking about the sorts of ways they could put these skills into action.

3. Teach Tolerance and Resilience

To successfully work in a growing collaborative and global community, employers will be looking for candidates who show an ability and openness to communicate with unfamiliar cultures and ideas. To build these skills, students will need exposure to open discussions and experiences that can help them feel comfortable communicating with others. School trips, debating sessions, visits to a workplace or Q&A’s with a local employer are all good ways of showing students open mind-set’s in action.

4. Help Students Learn Through their Strengths

We are all born with brains that want to learn. We’re also born with different strengths, and by growing the strengths we best identify with we can better feed that appetite for learning. One size certainly doesn’t fit all when it comes to developing young minds! It can be challenging to tailor the curriculum for each individual, but by looking ahead you can start to pinpoint elements of your classes which will appeal to particular students’ strengths and interests. By using “front-loading” techniques to bring these particular topics to the forefront of your teaching, you can start to tap into students’ natural curiosity.

5. Use learning beyond the classroom

By using what they learn repeatedly and in different, personally meaningful ways, students will find it much easier to retain and retrieve what they learn in the classroom. It will also help them better understand the importance of certain skills in their everyday and future lives. Try providing opportunities for students to "transfer" school learning to real-life situations – for example, when looking at solving a problem, ask students how they would approach a scenario that could happen to them, and the steps they would go through to solve it. You can make a start with the Life Skills Problem Solving session like something, which sets out an approach to systematically tackle challenges, with real-life scenarios to inspire your students.