Using Quotation in teaching EFL

"The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance". It means that when you stop learning, you loose a good thing in your life. Also, when you start being an ignorant, you have an evil thing inside yourself. The quotation can be applied to the students. If they don’t have the motivation to learn, then they won’t have the learning spirit anymore and will ignore the learning process. Thus, the teacher must try to motivate students to learn by applying the quotation techniques in the classroom.    

To start with, the teacher can give the quotation to the students. Before the teacher starts the class, the teacher writes a quotation related to the topic of the lesson on the whiteboard. So, the quotation can be used in the warming up activity. The teacher asks some questions about the quotation that eventually lead the students to the topic of lesson, and at the same time, the teacher sets up the context of the lesson for the students. One more thing, make sure that you understand the meaning of the quotation well, so you can explain it to the students and can relate it to the lesson.

Next thing to do, the teacher asks students to find the quotations. For the next meeting, the teacher asks a group of students to find several quotations. They must collect several quotations from books, internets and other sources related to the next topic. Later on, the group will have to give a short presentation about the meaning of their quotations. After that, the teacher only needs to summarize the presentation, then continue the lesson directly from the main activity. If the teacher wants, the quotation can be made into a writing homework. So, the teacher assigns every student to collect one quotation or more. Then, the teacher asks every student to write his or comments consisting of several paragraphs about 300 until 450 words.  

Last but not least, the teacher can use the quotations to teach sentence structures, pronunciation of words, and a host of other language aspects. For example, the following two quotations “ the way out of trouble is never as simple as the way in” and “nothing shows a man’s character more than what he laughs at” can be used to explain comparison. The teacher asks the students to discuss the meaning of the quotations. After that, the teacher can highlight the bolded words showing comparison. Then, the teacher focuses on the structure part by giving several grammar exercises to the students.

To sum up, the quotation technique can be applied in the classroom. Thus, the quotation can be used not only to motivate students but also to teach the lesson.

Article source: http://eslarticle.com/pub/english-as-a-foreign-language-efl/5499-using-quotation-in-teaching-efl.html