Factors promoting the use of English around the world:

The spread of English is the result of a number of historical and pragmatic factors:

1- Historical factors: English was the language of the British Empire, and later that of American expansion. English used as primary language needed for government in the British Empire. Plus it's the language of communication, commerce and education in those part pf the world under the British colonial administration. 

2- Globalization: English is the primary language for communication within the organization. globalization has contributed as much as to the idea to the English as it has the actual role in communication. In other words, English represents an image in popular imagination established through media, advertising rather than a political necessity or reality for many people.

3- Economic development: English is important to economic development of the country. Countries with poor English language skills have lower levels of trade, innovations and income, example Colombia, Panama...etc

4- Communication: Since English is widely taught and used around the world, it is a convenient language for communication across national boundaries and in a wide range of professions. 

5- Business and Entrepreneurship: As we know the USA emerged as global economic power after WW2, International trade and commerce become increasingly dependent on the usage of English.

 

Other factors such as: Education, Travel, Popular Culture, The media, A global English language teaching industry, and Symbolism are also main and important factors. 

Unusual Schools!

1- Dongzhung Mid-Cave Primary School: as we see this school is located in cave  in the mountainous Miao village in Guizhou province, China.It includes 186 students. 

2- "The Boat Schools of Bangladesh: Twice a year, Bangladesh experiences floods which leave millions of its citizens without access to clean water, electricity, and other necessities. It becomes difficult for children to attend schools and for those schools to keep their doors open. To combat the challenges caused by the annual floods, a nonprofit organization called Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha came up with a brilliant solution. They built houses, health care centers, and schools that float." this school were built under certain circumstances. 

3- Abo Elementary School: "it is found in U.S.A and it is underground school;The school is completely underground. A playground was built on its roof. The school has three different entrances, each of which is protected by an 800-kilogram (1,800 lb) steel blast door. It’s also equipped with decontamination showers. The school is reportedly capable of resisting radiation and withstanding a 20-megaton blast. In its day, it had a morgue, a generator, a well, its own ventilation system, and stockpiles of food and medication. Despite all of this, many of its students had no idea that they attended elementary school in a bomb shelter."
many schools and shelters were also built under the ground to protect the people and to live in safe place.

4- Gulu Elementary School: it is located in the mountainous Hanyuan County, 

Sichuan Province, China. this mountain is very high and students should walk a long
distance to arrive.

5- The Philadelphia School of the Future: this school requires no books, 
the notes can be taken on tablets or phones all the teaching learning process 
can be done using technological devices.

6- Brooklyn Free School: there is no curriculum in this school, students can choose 
any type of lesson that they want to study. 

Reading Extensively

WHAT ARE THE CHARACTERISTICS OF EXTENSIVE READING?

Reading large quantities of material, stories, novels...etc

Reading consistently (in regular basis)

Reading longer texts

Reading for general ideas

Specify an hour a day just to read silently.

THE AIM OF EXTENSIVE READING:

To flood learners with large quantities of L2 input with few (or no) specific task on this material. (Hafiz & Tudor)

THE IMPORTANCE OF EXTENSIVE READING:

- Extensive reading offers the learner many ways of working independently 

- Extensive reading certainly has the beneficial of greatly increasingly at students exposure to English language and can be particularly important where class contact time is limited 

- Useful resource for all ages

- Learners can build their language competence progress in their reading ability, become more independent in their studies, acquire cultural knowledge and develop confidence and motivation to carry on learning.

- Introducing children to books contributes the curriculum objective of encouraging critical thinking and positive attitudes towards imaginative experience. 

Read to your babies

Majority of people have wrong or no idea about the time they should start reading to their babies.
Parents should start reading for their babies at age 3-6 months. Yes, the mother or father can hold their baby close and read, talk and sing, the baby will start enjoy looking at mirrors and pictures. 
Make sure the books you select are big in size, rich in colorful pictures.
Children also enjoy sounds, so when parents are reading they should produce different sounds with different intonations and tones. Let them touch the book especially if the pictures inserted are 3D, they will love it. It is very important to make reading as essential part of their daily routine for example, reading at bedtime. 

"ON CHILDREN"

                                                                            

             
            On Children
"Your children are not your children
they are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself 
and though they are with you yet they belong not to you 
you may give them your love but not your thoughts 
for they have their own thoughts
you may house their bodies but not their souls
for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow
which you can not visit, not even in your dreams
you may strive to be like them
but seek not to make them like you
for life goes not back ward nor tarries with yesterday"
Gibran Khalil Gebran
According to Gibran Khalil Gebran, our children are not our children because they have their own thoughts beliefs and personalities, and one day they will leave us to live their own life.
one day they will leave, but we always think that will not because we want them to be like us, however one day we hardly want to be like them and imitate them. life goes toward never forward so be sure that this day will come.

Healthy Students are Better Students

"Brain imaging shows that children experience improved cognitive function and higher academic achievement after 20 minutes of physical activity" said Dr. Charles Hillman. 

physical activity with good nutrition habit that support healthy weight can have strong and direct effect on the child's potential to learn.

Enhancing academic success through healthy school environment suggest:
1- 62% of the teens don't eat breakfast everyday
2- Those who eat breakfast have better attention and memory than those who skip this meal.
3- 3/4 students aren't active for recommended 1 hr  each day
4- Active students are better on standardized tests for reading, math and spelling.

According to Dr. David Satcher, 16th U.S Surgeon General and director of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute, those who have poor nutrition, inactivity and unhealthy weight have also poor academic achievement. 
Moreover, poor nutrition creates hard costs, these costs include spiraling health expenses, lower productivity and a future workforce unprepared for success.
We should find solutions to improve healthy nutrition and physical activity for our society future, parents should start it at home, and teachers continue it at schools. 

Classrooms are busy, crowded, and complex places. The all requests lay on the teacher and to think quickly to make suitable decisions before having to act. Most of the time teachers have been left on their own to solve the problems that are related to creating well managed learning environments that will facilitate not interfere with learning. The teacher’s job is not only to explain the lesson and left the students with homework or activities, beside this major job the teachers have to manage their classrooms and students by rules to organize them. So that learning and teaching go hand in hand with managing and organizing.

Classroom management refers to all the things that a teacher does to organize students, space, time, ad materials so that instructions in content and student learning can take place. It includes all of the things that a teacher must do toward fostering student involvement, cooperation, and a productive working environment. Teachers have different ways to manage and organize their classrooms; also managing differentiates among classes, so that managing grade 1 is not like managing grade 10-11 and 12.

I’ve been observing grade 3, English class, for 3 weeks. As an observer we have to look deeply for everything happened in the classroom, the actions and the reaction of the students and the teacher. For classroom management; first there are a set of rules hang up on one of the bulletin boards.

 One of these rules are for hand gestures; so there are 4 kind of gestures each one means something for instance instead of saying may I go to bathroom, student raise three fingers so the teacher know what they want.

Also if they want to answer they just have to do like this:               

The teacher will immediately know that they have answers.

Eating in the class is not allowed, many times the teacher asked their students to through the gum, and if they were eating something she prevent them. I think she have to do this because lower grades have 2 breaks so they can hold it and eat in that time not in the class, also eating in the class will cause distraction and annoying.

When the students become noisy, and they are not listening to the teacher, the teacher said to them: “hands on head”, so they put their hands on their heads, “hands on shoulders”, so they put it on shoulders, “hands on nose, hands on mouth”, and then they put it on their mouth, so they keep silent and re-engaged to the learning process. This way is good they may also sing a song, or make a fun activity that helps the teacher to gain student’s attention. Add to this that the teacher that I have been observing in her class, never raised her voice, she always talk to them (not when she is explaining a lesson) in a low voice, I asked her why? She said that, if she raised her voice too much they will keep raising their voice, but when she talks in a low voice she is forcing them in indirect way to quit so they can hear what she said. Actually I did not believe her, until I observed her successful way several times.

In a case that there are a problem with one of the students, the teacher asks him to go outside the class, then they talk alone for one minute, then they came back inside. She may advise him or warning but not in front the class, because it will hurt them especially if his colleges make fun of him.

In managing our classrooms as teachers we should not have a free or waste time. So we should plan to use every single moment beneficially. What is happening in this class is that sometimes they just look at the board waiting the teacher to finish writing these 5 minutes are expensive, so instead of waiting and looking she can gave them an activity to prepare until she finished, or to read and try to guess the meaning of some words or also give them a game like preparing a riddle in English, so they can tell. There are many ways to fill the empty moment.

Teacher faces a lot of weird, tuff, and complicated situations. So she had to think carefully and deeply before making a decision and to have an act, because sometimes a wrong act makes the situation and the problems worst.

For example: a story happened with a girl in grade 12, life science section, 2010.

This girl was in grade 12, she was clever, and always far from troubles. One day she was so sick and her doctor decided to make a surgery for her, because this surgery she stayed at home without going to school for 3 months. After she became good she went the school, at first it was so hard to engage with her friends and to follow with her teachers. One of the teacher which is a science teacher was making fun of her, and said that she was resting at home and this is her problem not the teachers problem, this girl was so depressed and she decided to stay at home, and the next year she will study again. And that what happened she stopped the school and the next year she re entered and made her official exams and she had a very high grades.

In this case the teacher should take in her consideration that the student has a medical situation, and instead of making fun and hurting her, she should, and this her job, to offer some help, maybe by giving summaries of the lesson, or meeting her outside the school to cover what she missed. Moreover the teacher has no right to say a bad word in this case because as I said before the girl has a medical situation. The teacher should always think about her words before having an act, because of teacher’s wrong act, the girl stopped the school and hated the subject.

Finally, yes we are teachers, but our job told us that we are mothers, sisters, teachers, and friends for our students.

Encourage Physical Activity in Preschoolers.

Dr. Steve Sanders, a professor university of South Florida started the webinar by introducing himself, then he discussed the ideas and the slides. 
the first one was a quote by Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why "you can't stop the future, you can't rewind the past, The only way to learn the secret ... is to press play"
then he highlighted the importance of teaching our children the loco-motor skills: the uneven rhythm loco-motor skills like skip, gallop and slide. Plus the even rhythm loco-motor skills for example: walk, run, jump, hop, and leap. 
After that Dr. Steve explains the skills of traveling in the National Standards For Physical Activity. the movement skill of traveling is referenced in the National Association for Sport and Physical Education's National Standards (NASPE 2004). Moreover, children achieve mature forms of the basic loco-motor skills and vary the manner i which these skills are performed in relation to changing conditions and expectations. According to Dr. Steve infants first capable of changing the location for their bodies at about three months of age, when they turn over from their backs onto their stomach, they will soon learn to crawl and about year 1 they will tray to take the first step, so the basic loco-motor patterns develop naturally in most children. our role as parents and teachers is to keep them safe. The importance of traveling; is is clear that motor skills development is more than moving muscles, manipulating objects and traveling through space, but is also have implications for curricular and instructional directions.  He added that researchers have discovered that "back-to-steep" begun in 1992 to protect infant from SIDS and other threats to infant health, has led to an unfortunate trend- some parents are placing their infants on their backs during walking periods. as a result infants who spend more walking hours on their backs may actually experience motor delays.
One idea that attracted my attention is the emergence of some specific traveling skills may have influence on language development, so walking infants show more vocabularies than crawling infants.
We should give cues which are simply short phrases or words that focus the learner on the critical elements of the skill to be practical. 
Moreover, to present the loco-motor activities we should motivate them and practice it everyday, set boundaries, demonstrate the cues for each skill, and place children in variety of situations so they can practice in different context. 
Dr. Steve explained the importance of chasing, fleeing and dodging activities. From the very past children have delighted in countless chasing, fleeing and dodging games. He also gave a cue for each type. Note: adults are responsible for children's safety.
finally he talked about the basic tag guidelines for example to unfreeze a player, another player must do something to unfreeze the frozen player.
As teachers and parents we should take these ideas into consideration and try as much as possible to help them by following what he said. 
It was a great experience. 

Teaching nowadays

In the past teaching English was completely different from what it is nowadays. if we go back 10 years, teaching English focused on reading and writing, but no listening and speaking (as conversation or dialogues ). The learning-teaching process was teacher centered; it means that the teacher was the one who set the rules, choose the lesson and explain it alone without students interventions, students should be calm and sit silently and just listen to their teacher, there is no conversation. concerning grammar and vocabulary; grammar was taught separately; it means without a content. so the teacher put the grammatical rule, explains it then students do some exercises. Moreover, teachers tend to give a long list of vocabulary, so students must memorize it.
Nowadays, teaching is completely different, starting with the strategies and the methods, which are many, teachers should always use different kinds of techniques and never stick to one. our challenge is how to integrate the 4 skills in each and every lesson! listening skill has the same (or a little bit more) importance of the other skill according to Advanced Methods course, for example when we engaged in communication, 9% is devoted to writing, 16% to reading, 30% to speaking, and 45% to listening. moreover, as teachers we should create a positive atmosphere to encourage students engage in dialogues and use their L2 effectively. this will take us to another issue that is students centered not teacher centered; so students are the members in conversation, they can also choose the lesson and the topic that they want to talk about. The teacher can help by collecting data about students and knowing their interests to design such activities about the topic that they like. Vocabulary and grammar should be presented in a meaningful content.
there are a lot of issues related to teaching-learning process but what we are sure about is these issues are developing and improving everyday.

educ560

It is an interesting course, we are learning new things about internet world. 

we can use it now in more effective ways.