Page 369 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009

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Pointing to Charts and Posters
By charts and posters I mean both those designed for teaching English and ordinary ones from your own culture.
Everyday posters advertising films, pop groups or whatever else are useful in two ways. Firstly, they set the scene in the classroom. Students will definitely get the feeling of full immersion into an ‘English’ world if the images around them represent the language and culture. The vocabulary will seep in subconsciously or consciously, if you make a poster the basis of your lesson. There is a constant reminder of that teaching point on the wall which reinforces the idea.
You can ask shopkeepers for out of date posters which would otherwise end up in the rubbish, or write off to larger organisations you are interested in for freebies. Most big companies and charities love the publicity.
Posters and charts designed for EFL can be useful and can save time in class. For example, if you have a phonemic chart (a display of all the symbols which represent the 44 sounds in the English language) and a verb table on the wall, you can quickly point to the right sound or verb when a student slips up. The class can refer to these displays by themselves, too, so they can increase their independence.
Of course the question is, ‘How do I get hold of them?’ Well if you have not yet attended any EFL seminars, conferences and events where these things are freely available in conjunction with new book releases, write to publishers of EFL books and ask them. Oxford University press at www.oup.co.uk, Cambridge University Press at www.cambridge.org/elt , Longman at www.pearsonlongman.com and Thomson ELT at www.elt.thomson.com are very cooperative with requests like these.
Keep your posters fresh by putting up new ones every few months. Old ones don’t generate interest after a while. If you are overseas, see if your friends back home can send you a few and if they are in really short supply, rotate them so you swap the posters with a teacher in another classroom.
Part VI: The Part of Tens