One thing i have taken away from the reading is that everyone has ideas about how to teach. Taking different aspects, lessons or approaches can only help a teacher grow and become more proficient. The long list of approaches since the late 1880's is evidence of everyone's research and ideas to effectively teach a language. So the example of the classroom session provided in chapter 1 gave me an opportunity to reflect on some of my own ideas.
Particuarly in number 6 of the lesson when the T provides her own definitions verbally and the students seemingly nod in agreement with the T that they understand. However many times i have nodded when a teacher asked a question even though i did not understand either the question or the answer. I think it was a mistake for the teacher to move on so quickly without some verbalization from the students besides a head nod before moving on. I might have asked the students to describe these words or use them in sentences. Just any activity for the students to use these words that most likely they just learned. I believe that repetition is keying to learning vocabulary. This type is characteristic to the audiolingual approach where memorization and repetition are activity types.
One thing in my experiences as a language learner is that repetition gives the sense of confidence using certain sentence structures and word combinations. So i see it as a vital part of the learning process not to move on to the next exercise but see this as an opportunity to engage the students and gain more confidence.
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3 comments:
Excellent observation about point 6! I'm glad that you connected repetition and engagement, because sometimes, repetition (done incorrectly) can actually hinder student engagement.
ESL teacher has to be effective, explicit and understandable.As you mention repetition is an excellent way to be understandable. It is useless trying to do everything once. The learning should be from easy to difficult. Next move should come after the previous one understood. One of the best way to provide this as you highlighted is repetition.
I totally agree with you regarding repetition. I believe to that the imitation and then repetation are the safest and most useful way of learning a language especially, if the language is learned in chunks and thought groups. As you know, through repetition one learns the target language with correct pronunciation, structure, and use as well as fluency and even prosoddy (if first imitation takes place).
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