Every language learner faces particular challenges when they begin the process. Children, in particular, need a specific teaching methodology to get the most out of every class.
TEFL teachers must stay on top of their game during and after class. They have to engage children’s wild imaginations while paying close attention to the type of mistakes and blunders they’re making.
Today, we’re offering a helping hand to every English teacher whose class consists of children. We’ll give you practical tips you can implement to help your students become fluent speakers in English.
1. Visuals, Visuals All the Way!
We’ve mentioned children’s wild imaginations. Guess what they respond to best when learning? It’s visual content of all sorts.
When you’re explaining the difference between pen and pencil next time, make sure you supplement that with visuals for each word.
This will help in gaining a better understanding and building associations between the word and its real-life form. Also, it keeps your young students engaged because it’s certainly more exciting to look at cartoon images-or any images, for that matter-instead of just reading a list of words.
2. Go at a Steady Pace:
This is related to simplicity in teaching. You have to keep in mind the unique challenges children face when learning English. Not all of them will have come from a privileged background where English is used a lot.
Therefore, it’s your responsibility to move at a pace where everyone is learning together and progressing well.
If you go too fast, you risk losing children’s attention because they either won’t be able to keep up or they’ll get bored of not understanding anything.
This is doubly true when discussing grammar. If your students are still at a stage where they have trouble telling the simple present from the simple past, you know you need to slow down.
3. Role-playing for an Active Classroom:
A very underutilised method in modern classrooms is role-playing. Children love it when you assign them roles and tell them to read instructions from a piece of paper.
For example, suppose that today is vocabulary day and you want to teach children words associated with royalty (i.e., king, queen, and knight).
You give each one their designated role and write down the definition of each word and one of its contexts. Then, it’s time for each student to get up and read from that piece of paper about the word they’re role-playing.
It’s literally one of the best ways to hold children’s attention and ingrain language patterns faster into their brains.
4. Utilize Technology:
Technology is everywhere these days. It’s a tool that demands you become proficient in using it to improve every aspect of your life.
Learning is no exception. You can use educational apps that help teach English, like Polar Pairs.
You can also utilise online dictionaries in case children don’t have physical ones. Use a projector for the best results.
5. Do Something Outside the Class:
You can arrange to have children go on a trip to a local park, a safe picnic area, or even a bus ride.
You can then teach them about their surroundings along the way. For example, if you’re in a park, you can point to each object in the vicinity and explain it in English.
If you see a zoo, teach children about its meaning and the kinds of animals it has. If you’re on a bus ride, the bus itself is a place where grammar and English language rules can be discussed.
There are many examples here as well. You can explain the difference between “I got on the bus” versus “I got in the car.”
It’s a pain point for many English learners! Children as well.
6. Educate from the Calendar:
This tip refers to teaching children about the English language by focusing on English holidays, such as Valentine's day, Halloween, and Christmas.
Each one of these holidays holds a treasure trove of knowledge, and they’re all interesting in their own right.
Resources about each abound on the internet and in libraries. Depending on the educational institution you’re working at, or if you teach at home, you can take everyone in class on a trip on each of these occasions.
They’ll find the experience very interesting because people around them will act in accordance with each event.
7. Rhyming Is Your Friend:
As a teacher, your job is to get as creative as possible when coming up with a lesson plan. This is even more important with children.
One way to do that is to employ nursery rhymes, mnemonics, and songs to stimulate learning and help children make sense of hard-to-grasp English nuances.
Let’s start with songs. Songs are an excellent way for children to learn pronunciation. Songs that include a lot of active verbs are even better.
Some popular songs for your children include Brush Bus, Dean & Pearl, and Animal House.
As for mnemonics, there are many out there. One example is a mnemonic you can use to help students remember parts of speech. For example, we have:
The adjective describes a thing, Like a magic wand and a platinum ring; Use rhyming devices in the classroom whenever you can.
8. Gamify Your Lessons:
Like everything discussed so far, the focus should be on having fun in the classroom. There are many educational games you can play with the children in the class that teach them English well.
Games are a great fit for both quiet and active students alike. Games that require a bit of movement will make active children learn without realizing it.
Games that are slower will usually demand more concentration, making them perfect for quiet children.
Some good suggestions here include:
- 20 Questions.
- I Spy.
- Charades.
- Simon Says.
- Hangman.
Your teaching job will get much easier, and the children in your classroom will learn English much faster if you do this right.
9. Revisit Past Lessons:
This last tip is more traditional. In order to consolidate knowledge, you need to give the brain enough time to process it.
The same applies to children learning English. When you teach them something for the first time, it’s understandable that they won’t absorb everything.
When you set aside time for revision, however, it helps them go over past material and learn something new from it or simply understand it better.
To keep an engaging atmosphere, have rewards on hand when asking questions about past lessons. It’ll encourage everyone to participate.
In Conclusion:
Teaching English to children and young learners is always a bit of a challenge. This demographic requires that you implement more active learning methods in the classroom.
You also need to provide new stimuli every time. Don’t just stick to one teaching method. Diversify whenever you can.
Games, songs, visuals, role-playing, picnics, and technology are all fair game on the journey toward teaching English to children effectively.
At the end of the day, children want to have fun while learning, so if you manage to check off both those boxes, you’re doing well.
Children will naturally become more fluent speakers of English, and they’ll hopefully continue building these habits if more teachers follow some of the tips we outlined here.
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