Fumie just wrote in to ask:
Hello, Richard,
I’d like to ask you how do you make students speak English spontaneously in your lesson. Is there anything you always keep in your mind when you teach children?
Hi Fumie,
For me it’s all with the curriculum. Kids LOVE to talk, so if you’re teaching them things that they actually *want* to say, by listening to what they talk to you about outside class, then they just start speaking it in English when you teach them how. After all it’s much cooler to be able to say it in English 🙂
Be genki,
Richard
P.S. And of course if we teach them typical “textbook” English they just have no interest in using it whatsoever 🙂
name: Fumie
We did a homework last week writing about a place that was special to them. The answers were surprisingly beautiful and poignant…and this was from 15 year old students who generally reply in grunts! It is true that you need to find a subject that resonates for them, especially the teenagers.
I find this true with my adults I’m currently teaching. I have a questionnaire I hand out the first class to find out where they think they are and what they want to learn. I then base my classes on the information they want to learn. They are more engaged if it is what they want to learn.
That’s the thing: We need to know our customers and so provide models of (healthy, unifying) social interaction patterns they can relate to from their daily lives. These will also be practiced in the games. Besides drawing on the positive associations they naturally have with their own cultural artifacts (the ‘identification factor’) – or the genkienglish caricatures/art-style for that matter – to make things personal to the students through use of the imagination worksheets (these could be posted on the classroom wall or made into a digital collage/poster to be sent/gifted to the parents (read: “the culturally inclusive classroom”). I’m always inspired by classrooms plastered with the creations and personal stories of the students, in whatever form. And so am constantly striving to make this kind of visual and oral storytelling (which should originate in students’ realities and interests) an ongoing endeavor in class!
I teach small kids ( kindergarten) so I do is narrate pages from their textbook, then I usually ask them the same questions and increase the number of questions little by little. They feel confident to answer and talk as they know what kind of questions will come next.