Esra volunteers receive tips from Lola Katz at "English for School" seminar

Big letters or little letters - which do you use when teaching English. A or a?  Q or q?

How to deal with the sound of the letter versus the name of the letter. M - Em or mm?

How to insist that P and F are different?

Living from left to right rather than right to left.

Using cognates, words that are the same in both languages, [kiosk, coffee, telephone] and avoiding false friends, the use of a single word in Hebrew for multiple options in English. We don’t want our learners “inviting difficult eggs for breakfast”. Sorting out confusions: SHE in English is HE in Hebrew, HE in English is WHO in Hebrew, WHO in English is ME in Hebrew; I won’t go on.

How to promote awareness of all the English that surrounds us; notice those English words on tins, packages, advertisements, designer labels.

Encourage pupils to figure things out, rather than supplying them with a straight translation: What do you think it means? Teach them to guess meaning from context.

Help students who keep forgetting what you just told them, and get rid of that negative self–image created by someone who once told them they have short memory retention.

Don’t bother with words ending in –ly, adverbs; why look up `actually` in a dictionary? It won’t change the meaning of the sentence.

All these topics and more were handled with consummate skill and knowledge by Lola Katz at the epic `English for Schools` Seminar held on February 16 at Beit Fisher, Raanana. Over twenty ESRA volunteers were present, all at various stages of the schools` program; some are about to take the plunge; some help out in elementary schools; some in primary schools; some help weaker pupils in ninth grade; some chat to students in their final year prior to their oral examinations. We all benefited from the learning strategies Lola presented to us. And we look forward eagerly to the next seminar: Sunday April 25.

Gill Teicher is the coordinator of ESRA’s 'English for Schools' program. For more information: gillit@zahav.net.il

*From an old printer's axiom. Back in the early days of printing presses, each line of text had to be set up one letter at a time. Since the letters in the press were reversed (so they'd print forward), the printmaker (or typographer) needed to be careful not to confuse one letter for the other.
Reminding someone to "watch his p's and q's" means to pay attention to the details.