Hello everybody. In Afghanistan we do not have a lot of facilities to use in order to help the students improve their English. We most often use our local newspapers which are not in English. I myself cut out some articles, write down the new words and translate them into English. Then I read the article out loud, translate it into English and make a sentence for each new word.
Then the students read it aloud and make sentences with most of the words. Finally we all get together and discuss the theme. Of course, we ask someone to go to the board and talk about the article so that the others can ask questions. It only takes one and a half hours to learn a lot of words and get encouraged to speak in English in front of people.
Added by Abdul Jawad Samimi, Afghanistan
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Hello Abdul,
I am writing from Canada. I don't know if this will be 'new' to you, but one way I teach my student when I don't have resources, is I have the students talk about a subject with which they are familiar (family, a place they visited, their favorite subject in school), or something they have researched.
One student (sometimes I alternate between days) speaks from their desk or in front of the class. Another student writes what the student says, word for word, on the board (including all mistakes and Ums, Ahs, etc). Then, as a class we look at the 'speech' on the board and correct it together.
Once this has been done, in pairs or small groups, students 'summarize' the information presented in the speech (to make things a little more challenging; I ask them to change the tense, say it in the passive, alternate vocabulary words to use synonyms instead of exact words, or vary between direct and indirect speech). This can take up to an hour depending on the speech.
Another technique: students present on 'how to do something'; make rice, boil and egg, dance, swim...this allows me to introduce various grammatical forms that allow the student to express themselves more clearly....rather than memorize or learn a grammatical rule. When they want to express themselves more clearly, they learn the rule more readily (in my experience).
Thus, I let the students experiences and knowledge become my resource. We collect and categorize information collected from their own lives; providing for a vast amount of resources that you can continue to use throughout the year.
Hope this is useful.
qbee