Green Thumb - English Idioms
The idiom "green thumb" refers to the ability to grow plants well, for example: Whenever I buy a plant, it always dies shortly after. I really don't have a green thumb. Because my plants always die, I don't have the ability to grow plants well, hence, I don't have a green thumb.
Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next.
This unit covered the two receptive skills ? listening and readin.
The reasons for using these skills can either be for a purpose, to gain information or receive instructions, or for entertainmen.
Sometimes reading or listening can involve both of these reason.
When using our receptive skills we must be able to recognize and understand both the words and the overall meanin.
This will often involve using pre-existing knowledge to understand the context and meanin.
When reading and listening we can use several skills such as predicting the content of an article based on the headline; scanning an article for specific information; skimming the article to get the general idea of the contents; reading/listening carefully to receive detailed information; and deducing the information we need by the contex.
There are, however, problems with using these skill.
Language can prove a problem if it is beyond the level of the students or just the important words are too har.
In this regard reading is easier than listening because the words are available for as long as they need to comprehend their meaning, whilst with listening there is a very limited amount of time for students to understand the.
There are two main ways to solve this proble.
Either pre-teach the essential vocabulary for the listening/reading activity they will do or carefully select the materials they will use to match the students leve.
If pre-teaching the vocabulary, try to avoid letting students become too dependent on knowing every word they hear, as this will hinder their ability to understand the text as they might get hung up on a word they don?t understand instead of using the rest of the words to understand the meanin.
Make sure to try to choose topics that interest the students and vary them to make all students happy at some point, and if this is not possible, try to make the students interested in a topic with fun engage phases even if the overall topic isn?t initially of interest to the.
Finally make sure any tasks regarding comprehension of the material aren?t too hard or too eas.
Promote students comprehension rather than just checking they comprehen.
The reasons for using these skills can either be for a purpose, to gain information or receive instructions, or for entertainmen.
Sometimes reading or listening can involve both of these reason.
When using our receptive skills we must be able to recognize and understand both the words and the overall meanin.
This will often involve using pre-existing knowledge to understand the context and meanin.
When reading and listening we can use several skills such as predicting the content of an article based on the headline; scanning an article for specific information; skimming the article to get the general idea of the contents; reading/listening carefully to receive detailed information; and deducing the information we need by the contex.
There are, however, problems with using these skill.
Language can prove a problem if it is beyond the level of the students or just the important words are too har.
In this regard reading is easier than listening because the words are available for as long as they need to comprehend their meaning, whilst with listening there is a very limited amount of time for students to understand the.
There are two main ways to solve this proble.
Either pre-teach the essential vocabulary for the listening/reading activity they will do or carefully select the materials they will use to match the students leve.
If pre-teaching the vocabulary, try to avoid letting students become too dependent on knowing every word they hear, as this will hinder their ability to understand the text as they might get hung up on a word they don?t understand instead of using the rest of the words to understand the meanin.
Make sure to try to choose topics that interest the students and vary them to make all students happy at some point, and if this is not possible, try to make the students interested in a topic with fun engage phases even if the overall topic isn?t initially of interest to the.
Finally make sure any tasks regarding comprehension of the material aren?t too hard or too eas.
Promote students comprehension rather than just checking they comprehen.
