KAILLERY 鎧孋軒: Students, follow teacher to read?

星期四, 2月 23, 2012

Students, follow teacher to read?

How well a teacher conducts a lesson is basically dependent on how precise he/she delivers instructions to his/her students.

For example, “class, open your book to page 23”, “students, raise your right hand”, “please be quiet”, and etc etc….

Well, these authoritative commands are generally called ‘Classroom Instructions’. Undoubtedly, class instructions play an important role to function a lesson effectively, but most of English language teachers who are not natively speaking the language sometimes fail to deliver classroom instructions correctly instead confuse the students.

For instance, “Students, follow teacher to read this sentence.” At first, I find this instruction has no problem, because it is likely meant “同學們，跟老師讀這句子” if it translates to Chinese.

It seems making sense, huh?! At least for me. In fact, it doesn't!

Thanks to one of my lecturers, Puan Ranjini, corrected this wrong instruction, not FOLLOW me, but REPEAT AFTER me. (The word ‘follow’ means move behind someone~ literally it also means 跟 in Chinese)

Oh no, that’s mean I ‘follow’ wrongly for more than a quarter century! (Another mistake of that sentence is the appropriate usage of the word/address ‘TEACHER’; I will discuss it in my following post.)

The mistake occurred most probably due to my mother tongue’s influence; I really need to think or imagine myself is an Orang Putih! So, put away all of my Chinese thinking~

Here are some useful classroom instructions which I got it in the internet. (With Chinese meaning)