TEACHERS DISCUSSION FORUM
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#1 Parent Beth - 2014-11-12
Re Teaching the under-10 age group.

It depends on how you define YL students according to age level. 5 - 6 y/o kids are not on my agenda anyway as I focus on foreign language teaching methodologies for YL students of an age group where foreign language teaching normally is provided according to the traditional curricula of High and Middle schools in many countries. It's certainly not the 5-6 y/o age group range. The procedures you outlined for teaching phonemes in another post, for example, are commonly known and nothing new. Still, you haven't really refuted my critique on drills in no way whatsoever. My point is that pronunciation in L2 improves as students continue to practice the language over time simply by imitation when listening to other native speakers. That's especially true for YLs. Adult learners differ for obvious reasons in that respect.
This whole comment has very little substance and is mainly waffle.

YL is defined as under 18 years, and this thread is about teaching the under-10 age group, so your comments about middle/high school and university are utterly irrelevant to the topic.

I never said the method I use for teaching phonemes is anything new. Yet again you have criticised yet not offered an alternative method. Perhaps because you have no experience of teaching this age group and therefore cannot offer an alternative. Thus proving you are happy to mock, but have nothing constructive to add.

If the grammar point, for example, was using -s for simple present tense verbs with a 3rd person singular subject, there are several ways to teach that point, and it obviously depends on the individual students in your class how you would approach teaching that point. If it works in that class, it'sd fine, and you were right to use this approach. When the feedback of students in another class shows that it was not successful, you may consider another approach. That is to say, that what works in one class may not work in another. Hence, there is nothing "correct" or "incorrect" about using certain approaches.
So why, exactly do you mock the methods aforementioned for YL teaching? When these methods are proven to work? All this says to me and everyone else is that you are unwilling to go head to head with me on how you would would teach 3rd person S to a class of young learners!

You will also notice that all these points have nothing to do with TPR, which to me is just another candidate for such corporate sectarian "teaching method" like the Berlitz or Inlingua crap. Making faces, by way of a broader definition of what TPR could entail, may form part of such a sectarian corporate "method"; but it is not obvious how this would help the process of L2 learning in any way. It certainly helps crappy places like EF making money by keeping YL students and their parents happy!
No, it's a proven method for L2 acquisition, that you knew nothing about and even in the face of the proof and the information, refuse to concede that you made a mistake and so instead have started spouting nonsense such as this fallacious 'sectarian corporate method'. Just another strawman to distract from the fact you are clearly out of your depth.
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Go to another board -