Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (44 page)

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Their pronunciation is sometimes better than that of adult students.

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They’re often less self-conscious about speaking than older learners.

If you work as an au pair to small children, you can just speak your language and the children begin to acquire it because they need to communicate.

However, as an EFL teacher you’re only likely to have your pupils for an hour or two a week, so acquisition is less likely to happen this way. You need a strategy for helping them learn.

Sorting out what young learners need

Children’s and adult’s lessons obviously differ in some respects. You really can’t just turn up and play a game so here are some things you ought to include in your lesson preparation:

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Shorter activities to match the shorter concentration span:
Even games or role-plays need to be brief and punchy so that the kids don’t get bored.

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Extra activities just in case:
Sometimes the children aren’t in the mood for a particular activity so instead of forcing them, have an alternative on hand.

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Eccentric behaviour:
Kids love it when you do something out of the ordinary. It gives them a reason to communicate because they want to tell you about it.

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Rewards:
Parents don’t always like it if you give their children sweets, except occasionally, but you can have stickers with smiley faces and positive messages. Pre-teens really beam when they get praise and commendation that they can show to Mum and Dad.

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Interest and motivation:
Try to make your activities lively and based on the children’s interests so that they really want to get involved.

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Sensory and kinaesthetic activities:
Use all the senses (maybe not so much of taste). If you can’t bring in real objects, tap into their imaginations.

Ask about how things smell, and what they look or sound like. And get them moving! You can encourage mime and acting out stories. Do activities standing up. Ask them to come up and write or draw something on the board.

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A balance of activities:
Try to alternate between sit-down activities and ones involving movement so that the kids don’t end up over excited or bored. It disturbs other classrooms if there’s constant noise but short bursts are more acceptable.

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Thorough preparation:
If you’re unsure of yourself, youngsters take advantage and start messing about. Know exactly what you want to do.

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Have a starting and finishing routine:
Repeat the same little songs at the beginning and end of the lesson for several weeks. Kids feel secure when they know what’s going to happen and when they’ve picked up the words.

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Revision and repetition:
Repeat information from previous lessons to reinforce the ideas and give the kids a chance to show off what they know.

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Visual stimulation:
Make your classroom and materials bright and colourful with lots of pictures.

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Discipline:
This is an area of concern for a number of teachers. It’s best to let children know what will happen if they’re naughty. Unfortunately, you may not speak the children’s language when you begin but you can always ask for the assistance of the school or a parent to set out the ground rules.

I find it helps when the children know that parents are likely to get involved if problems arise. For minor cases of disruptive behaviour you try getting that pupil more involved by giving them a special responsibility. This can improve confidence and prevent restlessness.

Imagining Once Upon a Time

You should always practise language within a context, and in the case of children, fairy tales and kids’ stories in general are ideal. Another benefit of stories is that they encourage the use of the four skills – reading, writing, listening and speaking. Stories improve general linguistic ability because children begin to paraphrase and summarise. In addition, they actually get some cultural awareness through this gentle introduction to world literature.

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No doubt you’ll read stories aloud in the classroom and this takes a little practice if you aren’t used it. Be sure to vary the intonation of your voice as much as possible so that key words stand out and so that the children are gripped by the music of the language. Invent funny voices for different characters and don’t insist on silence if the children want to interact with the tale. You can teach booing, hissing and ‘He’s behind you!’ if you like.

Getting the grammar

Grammar
is an off-putting word for most students, so when it comes to the little ones, it needs to be sugar coated a little.

Take for example a lesson on adjectives. From beginner level, children learn their colours so they know the basic ‘adjective plus noun’ structure – a blue ball.

Adjectives of personality are motivating for kids because they enjoy telling you what they think of the various characters in their stories. Fortunately, fairy-tale characters often come with their own adjectives, so you can use them as examples. For instance:
evil
stepmother,
ugly
sisters,
magic
wand,
handsome
prince,
big bad
wolf,
little
pigs.

Students enjoy matching the adjectives to the characters and to their flashcard pictures. And don’t forget the dwarfs from Snow White! Six of the seven dwarfs have adjectives for names – Bashful, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy and Sneezy – so you can easily have students practise using a subject, a form of the verb ‘to be’
and an adjective.

For example they can identify the characters from pictures and show understanding of what the names mean like this:

I know
he is Sleepy
because he’s in bed.

I know he is . . . because he . . .

Most fairy tales are in the past simple tense and can easily become gap-fill exercises where the children choose the missing words from a list under the passage, like this one:

Once upon a time, there . . . a woman who . . . very sad because she . . . a child but . . . not have one.

wanted was did was

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Some famous lines from stories provide a context for introducing other tenses:

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Future simple:
‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down’, from
The Three Little Pigs.

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Present perfect continuous:
‘Someone’s been sleeping in my bed’, from
Goldilocks.

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1st conditional:
‘I’ll give you the child if you guess my name’, from
Rumpelstiltskin.

You can use stories to teach modal verbs too. Summarising the moral of the story from fables and fairy tales lends itself to this topic. You may start a discussion like the following:

Teacher: What do you learn from ‘The Tortoise and The Hare’?

Student 1: We
shouldn’t
rush.

Student 2: We
mustn’t
boast.

Student 3: We
can’t
judge by looks.

Expanding vocabulary

Many story books for children are designed so that you can just point at the picture and introduce the vocabulary. However, there should be a structure for learning, so it’s good to introduce vocabulary within topic areas. Once you decide on the topic you can find a story that lends itself to it.

Some modern TV characters are also shown abroad, not to mention Hollywood movies, which have international appeal. Use any story that’s appropriate for the age group. So for example:

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Food:
Hansel and Gretel

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Buildings:
The Three Little Pigs

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Family:
Cinderella

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Animals:
The Jungle Book

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Jobs:
Fireman Sam/ Bob the Builder

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Environment:
The Ice Age

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EFL teachers sometimes refer to
inductive
and
deductive
learning. Inductive learning means that students learn through examples and discovering things themselves so that they understand the meaning in context. Deductive learning means that you teach the rules of a subject first so that students refer back to the rules as a point of reference. Using a story to teach vocabulary is a deductive approach when you teach the children the words very directly. But the children also infer the meaning of certain words because of the context, so they learn inductively as well. So in the Hansel and Gretel story the children learn the words for ‘woodcutter’ and ‘witch’

inductively; they just pick them up. On the other hand, the food vocabulary is deductive because you tackle it head on. This means that you don’t need to worry about students understanding every word before you can use the story. They can work out some of it for themselves.

Of course children have their own imaginations and they enjoy coming up with their own stories too. When they create their own tales and pictures, they’re more likely to remember the vocabulary they’ve used, and they feel a greater sense of achievement if these efforts become posters for the classroom.

Children Only ESL-EFL at www.childrenonlyesl-efl.com offers free downloadable flashcards for children’s stories.

TEFL Tiddlywinks: Using Games to Teach

Games that have a clear language focus are a real asset to lessons and here I show you list of games you can adapt for TEFL.

Whichever game you play, I find it helpful to teach realistic game-playing vocabulary such as:

It’s my turn.

You’re cheating.

Pass.

Can I have a clue?

I win.

You lose.

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Adapting real games

Very often you can take a game you already know and tweak it for the TEFL

market. For example, I use these:

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Battleships:
In this game, you have a grid onto which you secretly mark off certain squares as the location of your battleships; your partner does the same on another grid. For the purposes of language practice, the grid references can be made up of numbers that sound similar and tricky letters of the alphabet, such as those in Figure 20-1. When the students try to guess the location of each other’s battleships they’re forced to pronounce their numbers and letters very precisely. For example: Student A: Is there a battleship at Q13?

Student B: Is that Q or K?

A

E

I

K

Q

G

J

H

W

13

30

X

14

Figure 20-1:

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X

X

Using

15

‘Battleships’

50

X

to teach

16

letters and

60

X

numbers.

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Bingo:
You can play bingo in lots of different ways. The traditional approach of course, is to have numbers on your card and then to mark them off as soon as they’re called out.

However, you can create your own bingo-style cards with pictures on instead. So if you’re teaching children about animals, have pictures of animals on the cards. It works well with food, clothing and furniture too.

This game gives very good practice in listening skills. Be really crafty and instead of calling out the word, just hold it up in writing. This kind of variation pushes the students to recognise English words in writing.

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Tiddlywinks:
Games like this, which don’t actually require speaking, can be used in a slightly different way. If students just enjoy having a go at the skill of the game, tell them that they need to answer a grammar or vocabulary question correctly before they have a turn. You can ask the students to revise a particular topic by going through their notes and making sure that they remember it, and let them play in return for their correct answers.

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Colour by numbers:
This kind of activity really reinforces the names of all the colours (and numbers too), especially if you can get the children to talk about the picture while they work. Ask them whether a particular item is to be blue or green, for example. This works well in very small classes.

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Simon says:
This is a fun game using instructions in command form, for example, ‘Simon says, touch your toes’. It practises saying the parts of the body and some useful verbs like ‘put’ and ‘touch’. The advantage of a game like this is that the shy child doesn’t have to speak but can still participate.

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Uno:
This is a card game that practises numbers, colours and a series of verbs and phrasal verbs such as ‘pick up’, ‘put down’ and ‘reverse’.

It takes some time to play a whole game, so you may have to reduce the number of cards dealt to each player.

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Snakes and ladders:
Create your own board with various revision questions on it. If the children answer correctly they don’t have to go the ladder despite landing on that square.

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Crosswords and word searches:
You can buy some children’s puzzle books but it’s much more fun if the children create their own to challenge each other, based on different vocabulary areas.

Using games from course books