by Jake Hollingsworth // Seoul, South Korea // www.JakeHollingsworth.net
Learning a new language doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen over several nights. Learning a language is more than memorizing vocabulary. A language is a fluid thing. It moves and breaths. There are even parts of a language that cannot be taught, only experienced. I can’t teach a student to understand thousands of local dialects and accents. I can’t teach a student to understand this person who stutters, or that man with the thick Irish accent, or even my mom with a slow Southern drawl. Students must learn to adapt. They must learn to think independently and move with the language.
It’s a long process.
This necessarily means that we as teachers must take it one step at a time. We must build, and build, and build some more. Because we already speak and understand English, it is easy to fall in to the trap of trying to teach every detail of a particular point of grammar all in one day’s lesson. But we must take it slow, always building upon the previous day.
Here is how I’m doing that now with elementary students…
1. I’m teaching my students that every sentence has one subject and one verb.
Ex. I ate a pizza.
I ask them what the verb is. After it is identified, I ask them who or what did that action. The 1st building block is to understand the relationship between a subject and a verb.
2. Next I teach them that you can have two subjects and two verbs in a single sentence.
Ex. I ate a pizza while my mom watched TV.
The 2nd building block is to understand that the number of verbs and subjects don’t matter, as long as they are matched up. Every verb must be done by a subject.
3. Finally, I teach them that subjects and verbs don’t necessarily need to match up, as far as numbers go.
Ex. I ate a pizza and drank Coke.
The 3rd building block is understanding that subjects can do multiple things. Every new verb doesn’t need a new subject. As long as it is clear who is doing what, the sentence will be OK.
This is just one example. Clearly, there are ideas and grammar rules not being mentioned in the 1st building block, but I only need to teach them what is necessary at that moment. We can build upon it later.
What about you? How are you intentionally structuring your lessons to build upon them later?
