The greatest challenge
about teaching adults -- especially beginners --is how to reinforce grammatical
structures in a stimulating way. Course books typically provide plenty of
practice in more or less repetitive exercises, which are meant to hammer home
to the learner the new grammar. Those exercises mostly consist of single
sentences with limited vocabulary.
My feeling is that once
the grammar and the vocabulary of the unit have been presented and
consolidated, the teacher is still left with time on their hands, time which
they must fill with meaningful input before moving on to the next unit.
Besides, compared to young
learners, adults are far quicker at understanding and applying rules and they
also have a head start in terms of experience and factual knowledge and,
therefore, a higher boredom threshold in class.
I have been trying various
ways of interspersing the wasteland of grammar and repetition with some
extracts from poems and songs. My main criteria for the selection of this
supplementary material are its potential for reiteration of the structures
presented in the course book and the intellectual stimulation it provides for
my students.
I will illustrate my point by providing an
example which worked quite well with one of my adult students. The grammar
practised in the course book is “there is/are” in all three forms – positive,
interrogative and negative. Along with the practice material in the course
components, I handed out the following:
Apart from striking a
chord with the student, it is the kind of input that the student will go back
to, if not to remind themselves of the grammar, to relish in it.
Before completing the work
on this specific unit, I provided the lyrics of the following song, which the
student was to listen to in the comfort of their home.
While I am aware of the
fact that the song as a whole will not make perfect sense to a beginner- or
elementary-level student, I have reached the conclusion that nuggets of gold
are better than no gold at all. After all, we do not understand everything in
its entirety in real life, but we don’t let this deprive us of the joy of
discovering things.
No comments:
Post a Comment