Translation- From Armenian to English
Original post in Armenian here
First part: by Catherine Yepremyan
Mentoring work with English teachers working with 1-3 graders
“Joy of learning” is the name of an educational program dedicated to 1-3 graders in our educational complex, whose main goal is to encourage love for learning among new 5-6-year-old students who have entered school for the first time. There is also an English course with the same intent.
First grade’s course consists only of an introductory oral course that is based on various videos, songs, rhymes, and dialogues.
At the suggestion of the mentor teacher, the newly hired teacher creates lesson plans for the upcoming week, utilizing the videos, songs, and dialogues included in the course. The teacher’s primary task is to have a lesson that engages all students present in the classroom, with a friendly approach, correct pronunciation of words, and a patient attitude. It is possible that there would be some students in the class may already know the words and phrases being taught during the class, thanks to their parents. Teachers mustn’t always rely solely on the initial language abilities of such students. All students should be included in training without any form of discrimination.
At the end of the week, the teacher submits a report on the results of the training sessions, and at the end of the month, the mentor teacher submits a report on the mentoring work to the head of the mentoring laboratory.
In the second grade, spelling and reading begin. Students orally practice saying and reading words, phrases, and speech patterns they learned in the first grade. Anna Ganjalyan’s audio book-notebook-textbook, “My First Steps in English”, with its methodological guide for the teacher, is used as a textbook. The topics taught in the second grade are: “English in our home,” “My friend,” and “My family.” These topics are included in the workbook.
The teacher is instructed to study both the methodological guide and the teacher’s functions specified in the program. In their plan for the week, the teacher notes the new words, phrases, and sentences that are necessary for covering and mastering a specific topic.
The teacher writes about the results of his/her work to his/her mentor teacher. The aforementioned methodological guide outlines various planning approaches for educational sessions. The teacher studies them and creates his/her own.
The methodological guide also explains how an educational topic becomes a family project. The teacher is encouraged to design lesson plans so that they also become family projects.
In the third grade, it is recommended to use Margarita Apresyan’s textbook written for the 3rd graders, and for mastering the language material, “Round up starter.” The language material, grammar, is presented orally, in the form of an expression, without mentioning any grammatical terms.
The third-grade curriculum lists 14 topics that teachers should work on with students. Each of these 14 topics is considered a short-term communicational project. For each lesson, the teacher creates lesson plans that list the words, phrases, and speech patterns and expressions that are typical of the topic.
During the mastering of a topic, the teacher notes in his work reports the language skills that the learners have acquired while mastering that topic. A description of these language skills is given in the “Assessment” section of the “Joy of Learning” English program. They are, by their nature, the first benchmarking of linguistic abilities.
The teacher should know that there are no grading systems when they are working in the “Joy of Learning” program.
Teacher’s IT skills when working with the “Joy of Learning” program:
Work with the “Paint” computer program
Edit videos sent by students and publish them on YouTube.
Working with a Fourth Grade Teacher
Fourth Grade English Curriculum and Grading System for the 2025-2026 School Year
The teacher creates lesson plans for the educational topics specified in the program, which include vocabulary work, language material, dialogues related to the topic, descriptive texts, and questions about the texts. Educational issues are summarized into videos created by students, which the teacher edits and publishes on YouTube. The teacher sends the lesson plans, teaching materials, links to videos sent by students, and already edited and published on YouTube to the mentor teacher as a report. The teacher should be aware that students are not graded during the first and second academic years. The assessment is only formative, evaluating the characteristic abilities in various language components as outlined at the end of the 4th-grade curriculum.
Textbooks and educational websites used:
Margarita Apresyan’s 4th-grade textbook
Round up 1-2
British Council’s “LearnEnglish Kids” website.
Working with a Fifth Grade Teacher
5th Grade English Curriculum and Grading System for the 2025-2026 Academic Year
The nature of the mentor’s work is similar to that of a fourth-grade teacher. At the end of the program, formative grading of the skills is also given by language components.
Second part: By Levon Vardanyan
Working with a 6th-grade teacher
6th-grade English curriculum for the 2025-2026 school year
While teaching in grades 6-7-8, English teachers are advised to use Matyushkina Gerke’s “Practical Grammar in Patterns,” a practical grammar textbook that teaches grammar only through verbal techniques, without theoretical explanations.
In the 6th grade, we see the degrees of comparison of adjectives for the first time, for which the following verbal examples are suggested:
Model: Is Vanadzor smaller or bigger than Yerevan? (smaller)
Vanadzor is smaller than Yerevan
Model: Is the film as interesting as the book? (…more interesting than…)
Curriculum in Middle School
English curriculum for 7th and 8th grades of the Middle School of the “Mkhitar Sebastatsi” educational complex for the 2025-2026 academic year
“Mkhitar Sebastatsi” educational complex: English curriculum for 9th grade for the 2025-2026 academic year
Course programs in the Research program
English subject programs for grades 10-11-12 of the Research program for the 2025-2026 academic year, according to the new standards of the “Foreign Languages” educational field and the requirements of the individual educational program
For teachers preparing to work in middle and high schools, the mentor teacher presents in detail the methods of developing different types of educational projects.
Educational project
Initially, the teacher is instructed to study the publication titled “Requirements for an Educational Project: Methodological Development”.
The teacher is presented with a summary structure of the educational project.
Project title
The goal of the project is to simulate a problem encountered in real life, the solution to which is provided by the realization of the project.
Project’s deadlines, participants, and division of labor
Learned knowledge and skills acquired by students during the implementation of the project
Description of the research work process
Public presentation-defense of the final result (article, presentation, video, translation, etc.)
Feedback: summary and experience of the students, teachers, parents, and invited experts
Teachers working with 8th-9th grades in middle school and grades 10-12 in the research program are invited to study and analyze the following already implemented projects:
Learning to Write – Yura Ganjalyan
Discovering the Wonders of Nature – Nune Aydinyan
The teacher is recommended to prepare one short-term project, one medium-term project, and one long-term project, taking into account the requirements for the project structure.
The prepared projects are sent to the mentor teacher. Regular reports on the implementation of the projects are sent to the mentor teacher.
Creating the Learning Materials
The teacher is recommended to read and study the “English Teacher’s Guide: Creating the English Learning Materials for Middle and High School Students.”
The teacher is recommended to study the following teaching materials:
English Tenses and Paraphrasing
Confusing words: a new assignment
A task in English: communication
The teacher is asked to create educational materials according to the educational topics of the given class. The created educational materials are published on the blog, and the links are sent to the students and the mentor teacher. At the end of the month, the links to all educational materials created are included in the teacher’s report.
The teacher’s blog should have a “Study Material” section.
Studying the Experience of Others – Article
An English teacher needs to write an article about a study of the experiences of others. Such an article is in itself a research paper for the teacher, which pursues two important goals:
Professional Development Through Self-Education
Creating Pedagogical Armenian Material for Non-English Speaking Teachers
Steps for writing an article on studying the experience of others:
a) Choosing a topic: the teacher is asked to choose a pedagogical topic that interests him/her.
b) Suppose a teacher is interested in how to increase students’ motivation to learn English in middle and high schools. For this purpose, it is recommended to type «How to increase middle and high school learners’ intrinsic motivation to learn English – Ինչպե՞ս բարձրացնել սովորողների անգլերեն սովորելու ներքին մոտիվացիան միջին և ավագ դպրոցներում» in the Google search box.
c) Articles with similar content will appear on the computer screen. The teacher is asked to read these articles and write short annotations of them, highlighting the most important ideas that distinguish the given article from others.
d) These short annotations give the teacher a hint as to how to begin and develop the idea they have begun with the perspectives of different authors, and then compare and contrast these different perspectives. At the end, a teacher can write about the most effective working methods that they discovered, as well as express their own point of view on the issue. After all this, a teacher may also ask the same question to ChatGPT. The teacher must compare the answer received with what was written in the concluding remarks. It is with great satisfaction that we can acknowledge the fact that approximately the same methods are considered the most important, both those illustrated by our own research and those proposed by artificial intelligence. It would also be interesting to mention suggestions that are not mentioned in the articles that a teacher has read and studied. This is how a teacher will create an article that studies the experience of others.
The mentor teacher should also make time to attend 1-2 of the teachers’ training sessions to determine if a teacher has been able to apply the mentor teacher’s methodological instructions in practice.
Լևոն Վարդանյան 