Hammer Time!

This past week, as I mentioned earlier, I had a sojourn in Taipei in order to receive some training from my school. As not a few people have expressed curiosity about how you go about teaching a language to people when you don't know a word of their language and they don't know a word of yours, I figure this would be as good a time as any to write about what an EFL/ESL (more on acronyms later) teacher does in the classroom.

At the lowest levels and ages of language acquistion--I am talking about kindergartners or sometimes even preschoolers here--one teaches English about the way one would teach to English-speaking children. A lot of flash cards, a lot of repetition, and a lot of games. Actually, you will use a lot of games throughout the age and level spectrum, though the kind of games you use varies a lot as students get older and/or progress in language acquisition (not always the same thing).

Current thinking in ESL/EFL is that people acquire language better when they have actions they can associate with the vocabulary. So, to introduce "bird," you will probably be getting a room full of little kids to flap their arms and tweet. To introduce "car," you would play-act driving a car. And so forth. You can be inventive, as long as whatever you come up with will make the meaning clear.

Some language, naturally, lends itself to this kind of thing better than others. You can't, for instance, really do this with colors. For that, I suppose, you do a lot of flash-card repetition and pelmanism games. For the uninitiated, pelmanism is a twenty-dollar word for what the rest of the world calls a matching game: find two pigs, find two birds, etc. The key here is to make sure the game requires students to use the language. For instance, pelmanism should be played in a way that students have to use the word after picking up each card, . You also have to be very careful about not creating patterns, as little kids love to spot patterns and may end up learning, say, how to say "pig" every time the pig comes up in the rotation without actually learning what the word "pig" designates.

Classroom management at this age seems somewhat easier than what I had been lead to expect. A lot can be accomplished, say, by drawing three smiley faces on the whiteboard by each child's name and turning them into frowns if kids misbehave. Or drawing stars, pigs, etc., for things kids get right. Eventually, kids get old enough to realize this isn't a real consequence. But for very young children, it seems to work.

As kids get older, the games get more competitive. From what I gather, Taiwanese children (perhaps like children everywhere) are very competitive. You spend a lot of your class time dividing kids into teams and having them, say, race to hit the right word with a giant hammer (we actually call this the "hammer slap" game). Running dictations are also popular as a way of encouraging listening and reading skills. A running dictation works as follows:

1) Divide class up into pairs by having students say "Apple, Banana" or some such.

2) Post a text (a simple text for younger kids; can get more complicated as students get older) just outside the classroom.

3) Have each pair of students take turns running to the text to read a sentence or two and report back to the other student, who diligently (or not-so-diligently) takes it down from dictation. The first pair to get the text wins.

Another popular game, for various ages, involves any kind of thing that involves students having to hit the whiteboard with a sticky ball. This can include versions of tic-tac-toe, target practice, etc. Infinite varieties of this can exist, from what I gather, and at younger ages, students will think they're playing a whole new game if you merely change the shape of the target.

Another key is to be creative with scoring systems. Scoring systems have to be clear and easy to understand, but you can do a lot more than simply awarding one point to the team with the correct answer. For instance, you can draw a man walking the plank of a pirate ship, the goal being to get the man back to safety by answering questions or using the TL (target language) correctly.