Katherine’s preferred teaching setting

I have been teaching English to middle and high school students as a tutor since I was in college. I have always felt  a lot of pressure to make them get higher scores on their exams. It is really stressful to be forced to view English as an examination subject, not as a means of communication. That is one reason why I would like to teach younger children, especially those aged between 5 and 7.

Actually, I do not think that children under the age of 5 are able to well acquire English as their second language. This is due to the fact that they are likely to have yet to develop even their first language, Korean. In my opinion, only after building up knowledge of how their first language works, children can effectively learn English. On the other hand, children above the age of 8 have already started school, which means they might be required to learn more fixed and academic such things as grammar. This causes them to begin to view English as what they ‘must’ do for an exam or something. For these reasons, I prefer teaching children aged 5 to 7 to ones in other age groups.

 I think adequate numbers of children in each class are 6 to 8, and the daily one-hour class is a reasonable time for young learners to study English. Subjects I want to teach to young children are listening and speaking skills, because these abilities are fundamental and primary parts of language acquisition. In addition to listening and speaking skills, simple basic structures of the language and most frequently used words would be covered in my classes.

Resources I would like to use are a well-organized series of books for young learners and a variety of materials including video and audio clips that are available online. Learners are children who live in Korea and use Korean. Almost of them are middle class children. They rarely have opportunities to gain exposure to English in their daily lives. Therefore, they are beginners. One of the external things that will be expected to happen may be a conflict with the views of other people including parents.

Socrative

                                                                      Click the image above to get to the room for the quiz. Room number is 336690. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you.

This tool allows teachers to make up questions for a quiz more easily and quickly. What’s more, students can take the quiz with no bounds on time and place if they do using their cell phones.

Google Drawing

This is a promotion poster created with Google Drawing which enables users to work together. This tool seems to be useful when students have to do their project in groups.

Bombay-TV & Bombay-Movie

Topic: Let’s Make Writing Fun

This activity is for sixth-grade students(intermediate) to promote their writing skills. It can allow students to enjoy writing by providing opportunities to make their own funny stories. In addition, students can naturally acquire some useful expressions that are suitable to each situation while adding English subtitles to movies. This activity is likely to change students’ perception that writing is burdensome and boring, which can help them to  get to feel more comfortable writing English.

Activity1)

: After watching a short movie, add your own English subtitles to the movie.

Wordle

Topic: Word Cloud

This activity is for sixth-grade students(intermediate) to expand their vocabulary span. After reading the story below, students can acquire the words in the story through this activity. It allows students to get exposure to words visually, which leads to a rapid and easy acquisition of new vocabulary. It can also offer more fun if presented in the form of a game.

Activity1)

: First, read the story below and make your own word cloud by using one of the corpus tools. Then, play a wordsearch game with your partner.

Skimming

Q1) What did the ass do to reduce his burden?

Q2) Why did the ass drag the load heavier than before?

Q3) What do you think is the lesson of this story that goes in the blank space?

Topic : Aesop’s fables

This activity is for sixth-grade students(intermediate) to develop skimming, one of reading strategies. Students read the short story of Aesop’s fables at a fast pace by using important clues, such as textual organization or lexical clues, and then answer two questions, which lead to a better understanding of the story. After that, thinking about the answer to the question number 3, they can infer the main idea. This reading activity will help students learn a valuable lesson from the story as well as read fast and get an overall picture of it with ease.

Activity1)

: Read the story by skimming. Then, answer the three questions.

Pixton

 Topic : Proverb

This activity is for sixth-grade students(intermediate) to enjoy reading. Using a funny cartoon as one of the reading materials is really very useful and effective way to relieve their stress from reading. It means that students will be much more likely to get exposure to something written in English more frequently. As a result, it is evident that their reading skills will improve. What’s more, this cartoon introduces some proverbs in accordance with the situations, which can provide students with opportunities to learn about proverbs as well as improve their reading skills.

Activity1)

: First, read the story and guess what the meanings of some proverbs are. Then, find out Korean proverbs which have similar meanings.

Activity2)

: Find out a new English proverb and make your own cartoon story with the proverb.

Goanimate

Topic: Where are you going?

This activity is for 7-year-old learners(intermediate) to improve their listening skills. Since the characters of this video clip are about the same age as learners in the target age group and their conversation is similar to one that really happens  between young children, learners are much more likely to have an interest in it. Students will learn how to ask and answer the question, “where are you going?” and how to offer and refuse the offer. In addition, the video clip can provide visual entertainment with children, which makes them feel like watching it. There is nothing better than enjoying English and being exposed to it more often to develop their English abilities, especially listening skills. Therefore, such an enjoyable video clip is appropriate for material to teach young students English with.

Activity1)

: First, just listen to the conversation without watching the video clip. After that, answer some questions regarding to the story. Then, watch the video clip thinking about the answer to the questions.

Voki

I love this character so much. Does she really look like me? I hope everyone thinks so. Anyway, I think it will be very fun to interact with children online by using cyber characters. This can motivate them to have an interest in their learning and encourage their active participation.

Prezi

Topic: I want to be a musician

This activity is for second-grade students(intermediate) to enhance their listening skills. They can also learn some vocabulary associated with music(instruments & musicians) and characters in the story from this prezi. In addition, since useful expressions are based on the topic and audio content for listening, students can acquire them more easily. After listening to the audio clip, some questions help their better comprehension and provide opportunities to talk about their favorite instruments and what they want to be when they grow up.

Activity1)

: First, memorize the words and expressions. Then, listen to the audio clip and answer some  questions. Finally, talk about your favorite instruments and what you want to be when you grow up, using the useful expressions.

QR code

     

   

QR code can become one of the useful materials used in a classroom in this age of smart phones. It will stimulate children’s curiosity, which leads to an increase in interest and participation in class. However, the question is how effectively we can use it so that they can actually acquire English through it rather than simply feel curious. Anyway, it’s really simple and interesting enough to engage children in learning.