Language teaching, how do you do it?

[astromule]

Hi! Altough I've given some classes in Spanish and English, I have no formal training in teaching foreign languages. I wanted to know if you could help explaining me which are the different teaching approaches and what experiences have you had teaching a language.

A few questions:

1) Have you used your own material when teaching? Or have you said "use Assimil", for example.

2.1) Have they ever imposed bad material over you? I'm thinking in the context of working for a language academy where you have to use an "official" edition of a certain book.
2.2) How did you managed the situation? Did you use the bad book or succeed avoiding it? How?

3) The different teaching approaches that I know are
3.1 Michel Thomas (Direct Instruction), http://bit.ly/1I3dFMn
3.2 Total immersion: Middlebury and similar academies: http://www.middlebury.edu/ls A example in a classroom with be to use just the language that your teaching. Not properly "total immersion", but I needed to find a name for it.
3.3 Traditional: book with pictures, "what's your name? I'm John. And you?"
3.4 Glossika: thousands of phrases, no grammar. (At least the courses; I don't know what happens if you book a lesson with polyglot Michael Campbell)
3.5 Pimsleur: can we call it a "student centered approach"?
3.6 Assimil and working with bilingual texts in general. Could we include here extensive reading (http://toshuo.com/2005/extensive-reading-materials/)?

4) Is there a book that you can recommend me about this subject? I'm mostly interested in practical advice and techniques. I imagine that many thesis on Linguistics are fascinating, but they're probably beyond my level of comprehension.

Thanks in advance.

Astromule.

[Arnaud]

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[astromule]

Thank you for the recommendation! Yes, it's true that those methods are for people learning on their own, but I had in mind two situations:

1) Teaching or doing a language exchange through Skype, where you could recommend those materials to your language student/partner.

2) Recommending those materials in the classroom.
I don't know if this is pedagogically unsound (antipedagógico in Spanish) or if it would improve/decrease the language comprehension of the students in a classroom enviroment.

The methods you describe are reserved essentially to people learning on their own.
For classrooms, you can read "Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching, 3rd edition" by Diane Larsen-Freeman and Marti Anderson (PM me if you can't find it on Internet), which details several methods for classes and groups and is easy to read.
But I would be curious to know if Assimil has already been used in a classroom of 30 or 40 students and how it turned out and how the teacher concretly used the book.

[aokoye]

2) Recommending those materials in the classroom.
I don't know if this is pedagogically unsound (antipedagógico in Spanish) or if it would improve/decrease the language comprehension of the students in a classroom enviroment.

I'm in agreement with Arnaud on this one. I'd also suggest reading books and papers on foreign language pedagogy, taking a teaching methods course, or something of the like. Reading books on second language acquisition (SLA) would also be a good thing for you to do.

[sctroyenne]

I've taught in a few contexts with little to know training. The first was as an English language assistant in French elementary schools as well as in a bi-weekly English workshop for teachers. Then I volunteered with a refugee organization tutoring an adult refugee in English. And lastly I tutored a friend in French leading up to her trip to France to meet her in-laws.

In the first case there were textbooks we were more or less expected to follow but some teachers gave me total free reign. The major difficulty was classroom management - I had groups (sometimes half a class) of little kids to manage (and to add to the challenge, this was in the town that the film La Haine was filmed in). I found that the textbooks ranged in difficulty/depth from very simple and shallow to very complex. The simple stuff was a bit frustrating to use because I felt kind of useless being there, the complex stuff was very rich but impossible to get through with an average class (we basically worked on one chapter all year). And were all kinds of compounding factors that complicated things that I won't get into about how English is (or was) dealt with in schools at that time). Some things that worked:

- Always start simple and use lots of repetition (give like three vocabulary words or options for answering a question at a time and work between them until mastered).
- Keep the lesson moving with lots of different activities (and a corollary - overplan)
- Games can often work - they loved drawing monsters ("The monster has 3 heads, 5 eyes, 2 noses, etc) and I created a little card game based on Go Fish using food that worked really well (they'd ask "I would like some bananas please" "I don't have any, go shopping.")
- Also, songs can work. They loved Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes and The Wheels on the Bus. Though if you have to explain too many lyrics at once they get bored.
- A regular routine helps a lot.

With my adult student we were given materials based on their assessed levels which emphasized a lot of survival English. The materials were mainly just worksheets that focused on vocab acquisition. I ended up experimenting with some Language Hunters techniques with her and she loved it. I think that the question/answer format gave her confidence because she was speaking in full sentences. And the gestures helped a lot with no shared language between us. To incorporate some of the materials I'd do Language Hunters exercises with the cup of tea and then swap it out with items that were on our list. Not everyone I showed Language Hunters to took to it, though.

When my friend asked me to tutor her in French, I just adapted some Michel Thomas lessons to her needs. She preferred this method over her previous attempts at taking French classes because she was able to build complex sentences very quickly.

[kimchizzle]

I'm sure in many "language academy" type scenarios you would be required by your employer to use a designated textbook and materials and not be able to use your own materials much. They want their teachers to all use the same materials and teach in the same style. The students or parents are paying the school to be taught with the approach the language academy advertises, so the school doesn't want teachers doing their own thing too much.

Teaching solo, on skype or one on one in person, you have total freedom to use whatever materials you think would work. This would probably be harder though if you didn't already have a teaching background and know how to design lessons and exercises.


As an aside, I wanted to be a French teacher for long time, and a part of me still does. Heck, I even have a degree in French because that was what I wanted to do. Unfortunately, I don't have a teachers license and never took any course of making lesson plans, and now I'm heading down a different career path. So I'm in a similar boat, thinking of teaching, but I don't really know how to teach, but I would be looking for jobs in the US in the public school system rather than overseas. I'm sure I could teach beginner French if I had a curriculum and textbook to go by, but I'm not sure what to really do. I'd also love to be able to teach English as a second language but I don't have the qualifications to do that in the US, and I've already unsuccessfully wasted a year of time a few years ago sending in resumes and interviews for an English teaching jobs in Hong Kong due to a ex-girlfriend who was living there. So I'm a bit jaded about overseas jobs now.

[emk]

But I would be curious to know if Assimil has already been used in a classroom of 30 or 40 students and how it turned out and how the teacher concretly used the book.

I would also love to know this. 5 months of Assimil, at 20 to 40 minutes per day, seems to get a lot of people to a decent A2. In the high schools I attended, A2 is normally expected to require around 3 to 4 years of classroom study plus homework. (The university I attended was better. Students had the option of taking a year of classes that would get at least some students into the A2 range, followed by the option of a term abroad for full-time language study. Taken together, this could get some people solidly into the B-range.)

Even if there are no "Assimil in the classroom" case studies, surely somebody has tried Krashen's "comprehensible input" methods plus what the TPRS people call "pop up grammar." The individual techniques exploited by Assimil books seem to be well-known in the SLA literature.

[Takra jenai]

Since Krashen has been mentioned, his site and books are here
http://sdkrashen.com/
you can download them

[astromule]

@sctroyenne: Thank you very much for sharing your teaching experiences! I think that helps to have a realistic picture of what one is going to encounter before teaching.
I didn't know about Language Hunters. I've just checked their site (http://languagehunters.org/what-is-it/) and it seems really interesting.

@kimchizzle: That's true. If you start teaching for an academy, it's expected to follow a certain set of "rules". Perhaps advanced teaching methodologies would even go against the interests of X Academy, as many places want to retain students as longer as possible so they continue to pay, not to send them home quickly. Have you checked this book? http://amzn.to/1I5a803 Although it isn't stricly about language teaching, it speaks how to design lessons, among other teaching strategies.

@emk: I'm always going to Wikipedia thanks to you. When I read your log I though that Krashen was an user from the old HTLAL site.
On another note, I wanted to give you a "heart" but for some reason, I can only give you a "negative heart" (a heart with a -1 on the left).

@Takra jenai: thank you for the material!

I've began reading "Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching, 3rd edition" by Diane Larsen-Freeman and Marti Anderson and it seems really clear and interesting, the type of book that I was looking for.

[sctroyenne]

@sctroyenne: Thank you very much for sharing your teaching experiences! I think that helps to have a realistic picture of what one is going to encounter before teaching.
I didn't know about Language Hunters. I've just checked their site (http://languagehunters.org/what-is-it/) and it seems really interesting.

Also check out the Where Are Your Keys universe - it's essentially the same techniques (Language Hunters branched off from them). There are blogs and discussion groups for practitioners which can help you work through the method if you're interested in trying it out.