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Teaching English to Children |
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| Teaching
English to Children – and how we understand each other.
A few years ago I had a busy and exciting summer. I was preparing for
teaching English and Spanish to children (primary classes). After
having teaching experience only with adults this was a big challenge
for me. In fact that was the reason I accepted this job. I learnt to
play the flute, different verses, nursery rhymes, songs in English and
Spanish, clapped the rhythm of songs and tried to find out how to stand
in front of small children and how to introduce a song, a poem, a tale
or whatever, and what is going to happen in the English and Spanish
lessons of 25-30 minutes. I thought before it would never happen in my
life to teach foreign languages to children. The world of children is a
different world, you have to talk to them in a different way. Therefore
it is a big but very nice challenge to change yourself into a child, or
put it more precisely, it is a big but very nice challenge to reawaken
the child living in us!
The most important argument on the side of early foreign language
teaching at school is that children grow into another language merely
through their ability to mime the teacher and they develop speech
ability in a foreign language, too, in a period when their speech
organs are very flexible to form the sounds of another language.
Alright, that sounds good, but what can I do with children in the
lesson? And above all, I couldn’t use books, tapes or videos
as a rule at this school! The answer is in fact surprisingly simple and
is based on a very interesting phenomenon that mostly remains
unconsidered and unused in traditional schools at lower classes. A
small child, if untouched by such modern devices as computers and the
television, feels a basic urge to mimic the adults in their environment
– I have to add, that even children who get in touch quite
early with the technical world of today will feel this urge if they
have the possibility to mimic someone within the frame of a lesson. The
teacher doesn’t have to do anything else than stand in front
of the pupils and they will copy his movements his gestures and words,
speech, pronunciation. Mimicry is an important element of life for the
children until they lose their milk teeth. But even in the first years
of school this is relatively strong enough to be of use for the
teacher. In a lesson like this even the intellectually mediocre or
feeble children can have a fairly good achievement and can find joy in
foreign languages. It should be mentioned that in fact what is going on
here is not mimicking in a strict sense, but synchronic singing and
moving with the teacher
De facto the children are able to copy me in a fraction of a second.
Thus the children experience the atmosphere of a language through the
movements of the teacher, through the songs and verses. In that summer
I had a bit of headache, as I was only theoretically prepared to do all
that, even though I had visited some lessons of the class teacher. I
couldn’t imagine that these little ones (class 1 and 2) will
copy me in the same way in the English and Spanish lessons as they did
with their class teacher. And I had another problem that most adults
experience when learning rhymes songs and verses. I couldn’t
learn so many by heart as I imagined to be necessary to fill a
year’s lessons with. So I decided to learn some of them for
the first 3-4 weeks and then gradually learn others as well, enabling
me to be one or two steps ahead of the children. But in practice it was
different. You don’t have to perform a concert or a show to
the children with your repertoire, you are practising language, you are
playing with them and the language of course. Things were much easier
and instead of headaches I enjoyed the lessons and being with the
children! We could repeat a verse for example several times; the first
time in a normal voice, then in a lower voice and finally only to
ourselves. In the first lesson I realized that children would like to
have the thing I had brought along which made an allusion to the
meaning of a text we were singing or reciting while making certain
movements that described the text as well. We didn’t
translate anything, and I used the mother tongue very rarely. For each
song, verse or tale I had an object with me which was referred to in
the text. The children were eager to get in their hands the lamp, the
branch or maybe, in Autumn, a yellow leaf when singing, reciting or
moving with me. But we had only one thing for each song or verse, so we
had to repeat the texts several times, as almost each child wanted once
to hold the thing in his or her hands when acting. So we managed to
repeat a song or verse for 7 or 9 times (I usually got bored of it by
the 7th or 8th time, but not the children. They couldn’t get
enough of the actual thing I usually took out from the English box or
Spanish sack. Later on I usually repeated a song or verse for maximum 6
times and tried to amuse myself by adding something to it at each time.
Of course we did lots of things beside this, we played different games,
or I told tales to them. But I was very grateful, as one of my greatest
troubles was solved by this kind of meaningful repetition: how I could
learn hundreds of verses. That was not necessary, 10-12 verses, 15-20
songs, 3-5 games will do for a year! One of the greatest experiences I
had was while introducing a new song in my 3rd year of teaching english
to children. This happened in the first class. I usually introduced a
new song by its melody. I played it on the flute then we just sang the
melody humming without words holding each other’s hand and
wandering in a circle. Then at the 3rd or 4th time I sang the text as
well. The children usually looked very attentively at me and tried to
sing along. Of course they usually hummed and tried to mime the
movements of my mouth and get out the same sounds that I did. But this
time there was a little girl next to me holding my hand who sang very
clearly the song we sang for the first time. I thought she had a
brother or sister in one of the upper classes, whom I may have taught
this song to, and she may have learnt it from him or her, or probably
from a playmate from a higher class. But it turned out that she
hadn’t got a sister or a brother and she hadn’t
heard this song at all before. I was astonished by this fact and I
didn’t really know how this could happen, and even now I am
quite unsure about a precise explanation. Finally I decided to explain
this phenomena partially by the synchrony studied by W.S Condon and W.D
Ogston in the US in the sixties. These two scholars studied
communication between people, recording on film what they do when
talking to each other. They filmed the movements with 100 slides a
second and after studying their movements they concluded, when people
talk to each other they mirror in a certain way each other’s
micro-movements. In a certain way this is a kind of mimicry of another
person. This happens in a fraction of a second and serves the
understanding of each other’s messages. The power of
synchrony appears in each human being right after birth. I think I
could recognize synchrony in an active form with that very young lady
in my lesson!
Even if there is a great likelihood that you will get frustrated about
how to do it in the right way, I recommend teaching young children to
every teacher, as this is one of the greatest possibilities to get rare
insights into how language is being acquired, and sometimes into how
language itself is being created. Whatever strategies you find to solve
your problems arising when teaching children in primary classes, there
are two things to be borne in mind above all: the first is the being of
child in front of you and the second is the child within your own self!
Teaching English to Children is fun! |
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