Postby Stelle » Fri Jul 31, 2015 1:55 am
I could talk about teaching languages for hours! I've been a language teacher for 13 years now. But I'm not sure how well my experience relates to the auto-didactic approach of the majority of language learners here.
My training isn't specifically in second language acquisition, despite the fact that I've been a language teacher my whole life. I have a Bachelor of Education and a Canadian teaching license. I have specialist training in early literacy.
All of my teaching experience has been in full-time French immersion classes (ie. all French all the time). I've taught in French immersion public schools for nine years, and that's what I'm currently doing. My first graders will come to me in September without any French at all (and, in some cases, with very little English), and by the time they leave me in June, they'll be playing, reading, singing, writing and arguing 100% in French. All subjects are taught in French.
I also taught adults for three years, and I suspect that my experience there is more relevant to the learners on this board. I taught a full-year immersion course on a military base, for military members who needed to learn French for their careers. Their job was to learn French, so they were released from their regular duties for a year. They came in with zero French, and were expected to pass a government-administered official language test after 10 months. Those who didn't pass had another month of intensive study, and then took the test again. Most students passed all three components the first time (reading, grammar, oral communication). Those who didn't pass generally had to redo either grammar or oral communication, sometimes both. I had between 6 and 10 students in a class, for seven hours a day plus homework. It was very hard work, but my students laughed a lot and became very close friends over the course of a year.
I had a lot of flexibility teaching that class, so long as the results were there (ie. my students were successful in the final test as well as the interim tests aimed at measuring progress). I was also observed often - every four to six weeks. My students studied 7 hours per day, with an hour break for lunch, plus homework at night. Most days, we spent an hour on grammar/writing, an hour on reading and discussing articles, an hour on informal conversation (sometimes with native speakers as guests), an hour on role-plays and/or structured oral conversation, an hour on structured listening, an hour on test prep (which included listening, reading, grammar and speaking), and an hour on independent study (while I pulled students for 15-minute one-on-one conversations). Most days, we carved out some extra time to watch and rewatch clips from TV shows (sometimes with transcriptions that I made for the class), and talk about slang and informal speech.
For homework, they found articles or newsclips to share with the group, listened to audio clips, reviewed grammar and wrote weekly texts that I corrected extensively and sent back to them. I expected them to apply classroom learning to their written texts. I also had a classroom library (from my public school teacher alter-ego), and I encouraged them to borrow children's books. One year, I had a group that became obsessed with my set of Scooby Doo readers. Ha!
As a learner and as a teacher, I think that it's important to balance all four skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking. That's what I tried to do in my class, to the best of my ability.
If I were teaching someone from scratch as a once-a-week-tutor, I'd have to know how much time they were willing to put in. An hour a day? Perfect! Half an hour a day, four times a week? Not ideal, but we could make it work. I'd help them come up with a plan using a variety of resources. And I'd expect them to either stick with it or tweak it to make it work for them. Tutoring once a week and doing nothing in between is a complete waste of time for both teacher and learner.
As a teacher, I think that the very first thing that you have to do is put your students at ease. It's crucial to get students talking, to correct pressing errors (but not over-correct!), to model proper sentence structure, and to build confidence in the language. But even more, I think that it's important that your students laugh and enjoy themselves. Learning a language is always going to be challenging, but it also has to be enjoyable.
7 x
