Affective Teaching

Week Four: Discussion Task #1 A writing activity in which young learners can experience both grammar and writing in a creative way. One of the challenges of teaching grammar to young learners is showing them grammar is relevant and important. And in my humble opinion educational games make this very clear. The cross-curricular contexts mean that pupils build on their previous experience and use grammar to learn and communicate about something new. This makes learning grammar both motivating and memorable. I have successfully incorporated the Sentence Strips as an activity in which young learners can experience grammar and writing a new vocabulary in a creative ways. Here, let me describe this activity in a greater detail. Activity type: Whole-class Level: Beginners Time: 20 minutes Prep-time: 20 minutes Materials: Sentences cut into strips for each student (see attached picture) Pre-teach: Various (depends on sentence strips) Procedure: Hand out the sentence strips to the students. Eac...

Week Four: Discussion Task #2 Finding the right audience and making writing meaningful Having earned some experience with the writing classes I am in a good position to recommend a proven strategy for the meaningful writing, which includes affective elements. The below step-by-step guide reflects one of the strategies I used successfully with elementary school students. I. Introducing Strategy 1. Introduction of a writing strategy (storytelling thru sequencing, describing, introducing people, 5 Ws or any other) that structures and unifies writing process as well as familiarize students to critical thinking. II. Reading Stage 2. Vocabulary and pre-reading activities with flash cards that help learners expanding the background and reinforce them how to use new words in the passage. To deal with grammar the language garden tasks were employed sometimes. 3. Exemplary passage with engaging reading topic that serves as a basis for the subsequent discussion topics. Introduced with fun, illust...

Week Three: Discussion Task #3 Building puppets with students for a specific purpose Personally, I am interested in Dr. James Asher's method called the Total Physical Response that use commands in action to teach, which is also excellent for total beginners. In fact, if I was going to teach a class of total beginners tomorrow who had zero English, and I also did not speak their language, so I could not do any translating, I would use actions in my first classes probably for about the first month I would use teach using actions like he said: “Stand up.” And then I would stand up and they would look at me. Then would say “Sit down” and they would look at me. Eventually they would understand “Stand-up” means stand-up and “Sit down” means sit down. Then I would use more and more command and building sentences long, long commands using several parts and this would give them a core of language. They would start to understand English. And then, I would use the same vocabulary and start cr...

Week Three: Discussion Task #1 Getting Ready For Storytelling Stories are the oldest tool of teaching, and still the most potent. For most of human existence, we have used stories to share information and educate our offspring about the world. It is no wonder our brains have evolved to process stories more effectively than other formats of information. In fact, stories do more than allowing information transfer only.   In other words, storytelling as a particular method to teach language is powerful. Storytelling is a great way in teaching language because language learning happens unconsciously. It happens naturally when students to a certain degree understand the language. The best way of establishing strong connections with the language is listening to stories or listening to audios with natural, real language that learners understand. And when they understand, they do not need to be focusing on the parts, they do not need to focus on grammar or think about it. They will naturally g...

Week Two: Discussion Task #3 To me the below photo (taken less than a month ago) perfectly illustrates the idea of affective language learning, which involves using different senses and intelligences. A young learner on this picture will retain information for a long time if not forever because of the “hands-on” approach that involved discovering a recipe, learning from mistakes, curiosity to act like an adult, and above all doing real things.

Week Two:  Discussion Task #1 When teaching students how to read time from analog clocks I successfully adopted a plastic spoon as the hour hand and a fork as the minute hand. I also allowed numbers on domino blocks to be used at the beginning. All that helped me to achieve spectacular results among visual and kinesthetic learners in a short time span. Much, much faster than if I used instructions given in the book.

Week One: Discussion Task #3   It is commonly accepted that the Circle Time is a special time when children are engaged in an open discussion, reading a story, participate in games or relaxation activities with the aim of learning new skills, practice verbal communication, developing emphatic listening skills…etc. These activities and games are also designed to promote respect and better understanding. Benefits of the Circle Time are obvious and self-evident to me but there are risks attached, as well.   Let me take all that a bit personally for a moment and say you have a kid who has been studying English at a school. That is great but maybe the kid feels a little lonely, maybe his motivations are dropping a bit, so you like to find a private language institute in your hometown. That is fine but one should be very careful when shopping around to choose a class for a loved one. Do not just go to the first class you find. If you are looking for a private academy and classes with tutors,...

Week One: Discussion Task #1 I have finished reading Steve Kaufmann’s (a renowned polyglot from Canada) book and there is a great quote in that book when he says: “The teacher cannot make you learn. It is your responsibility to learn.” Learning comes from a student, not the teacher. The question then that I have, that you have, that maybe all of us, teachers have is what the purpose of the teacher is. What is the purpose of the classroom coming together with other students and the teacher? Is it even necessary to have a class or a school in the Internet Age? Good questions. And I also often keep asking myself: what can I do in augmenting the language learning process? What is possible for me to do more effectively as a teacher?   Well, in my view the purpose of a class and indeed the purpose of a teacher is mostly inspiration. We can’t do the work for the students and indeed the teacher can’t even give the skill to the learner. What the best teachers can do is change psychology, belief...