Page 146 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Inside the Language Classroom

Table 9.2 Useful Classroom Language
The beginning Hello, everyone. Who is absent today?
of the lesson Good morning, everybody. Did you oversleep?
How are you today? Did you miss your bus?
Is everybody ready to start?
During the lesson Getting students’ attention Classroom management
Pay attention, everybody. Get into groups of four.
Be quiet! Go back to your seats.
Listen to me, please. Work in pairs.
Raise your hand. Make a circle.
Instructions during activities Come out and write it
Open your books on page ... on the board.
Turn to page ... Giving feedback
Look at activity five. Excellent! Well done!
Listen to this tape. That’s great!
Repeat after me. That’s interesting!
Who’s next? Not quite right. Try again.
One more time, please. Have a guess.
The whole class, please. Not really./Not exactly.
A full sentence, please. Practise makes perfect.
Louder, please!/Speak up.
Whose turn is it to read?
Who knows the answer?
The end of the lesson It’s time to finish now. Goodbye, everyone.
Have you finished? See you tomorrow.
Tidy up. See you next week.

that we should start with giving genuine instructions in English the moment
the pupils start learning English.
In a study aimed at identifying the strategies used by EFL teachers to en-
courage classroom communication in the target language, Bratož and Žefran
(2018) concluded that the majority of teachers surveyed are well aware of
the benefits of using classroom communication for language development
but are unsure as to how this can be done systematically. Among the most
common approaches used for encouraging English classroom interaction re-
ported by the teachers surveyed were ‘insisting’ and ‘pretending not to hear.’
At the same time, the results show that while teachers do encourage learn-
ers to use L2 as much as possible, they often turn to their first language when
presenting new content, explaining grammar and disciplining. This suggests
that there are clear benefits in using a systematic approach to developing
classroom communication.
This was also stressed by Hughes (1981, p. 5) who maintains that teachers

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