So how does one teach little Asian kids English? Forget what you learned on your CELTA course. Or how you were taught to teach in your post graduate Masters or diploma of education.
We don't activate schemata, we don't elicit vocabulary and we certainly don't worry about guided discovery tasks.
We use flashcards and we drill sentence patterns. Then we throw balls, or hit them, or balance blocks on our head, or jump around with balloons between our knees. Anything to shake the boredom of being repetitively choral drilled with a class of 10-16 other Asian children. Then after we did something fun that had little to do with English we go back to drilling English.
I have a big box full of jenga blocks, balls, plastic hammers, cones, dice and balls that stick to the whiteboard when you throw them. There are a lot of sturdy wooden seats with a table attached lined up the sides of a long classroom with a big space for running around in. Very little Chinese is used in the classroom or in the text books. They have a sheet of vocab items that have the translation on them that they use to memorise the spelling. But they aren't required to memorise the translation.
So we have students chanting sentence patterns stimulated by pictures on flashcards. I'm not particularly against flashcards when it is an obvious concrete noun a simple picture is all you need to pair the new sound you are teaching them with its meaning. However sometimes things like verbs come up. Which can often be easily demonstrated with a little acting. But then there are more dicey concepts. Things like adverbs of frequency etc. At first I was flabergasted at why someone would think they could convey these things with flashcards. But then I realise that you need to use constant demonstration and concept checking to convey meaning. Flash cards just make useful props for drilling. It is possible for someone who is terrible at demonstrating and concept checking to have kids who are able to answer all the questions correctly on the test yet only have the faintest idea as to what they are saying. They are just responding with the correct answer to the question. Like saliva and the bell with Pavlov's dogs.
We don't activate schemata, we don't elicit vocabulary and we certainly don't worry about guided discovery tasks.
We use flashcards and we drill sentence patterns. Then we throw balls, or hit them, or balance blocks on our head, or jump around with balloons between our knees. Anything to shake the boredom of being repetitively choral drilled with a class of 10-16 other Asian children. Then after we did something fun that had little to do with English we go back to drilling English.
I have a big box full of jenga blocks, balls, plastic hammers, cones, dice and balls that stick to the whiteboard when you throw them. There are a lot of sturdy wooden seats with a table attached lined up the sides of a long classroom with a big space for running around in. Very little Chinese is used in the classroom or in the text books. They have a sheet of vocab items that have the translation on them that they use to memorise the spelling. But they aren't required to memorise the translation.
So we have students chanting sentence patterns stimulated by pictures on flashcards. I'm not particularly against flashcards when it is an obvious concrete noun a simple picture is all you need to pair the new sound you are teaching them with its meaning. However sometimes things like verbs come up. Which can often be easily demonstrated with a little acting. But then there are more dicey concepts. Things like adverbs of frequency etc. At first I was flabergasted at why someone would think they could convey these things with flashcards. But then I realise that you need to use constant demonstration and concept checking to convey meaning. Flash cards just make useful props for drilling. It is possible for someone who is terrible at demonstrating and concept checking to have kids who are able to answer all the questions correctly on the test yet only have the faintest idea as to what they are saying. They are just responding with the correct answer to the question. Like saliva and the bell with Pavlov's dogs.
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