TEFL Summative Assessment: My Experience And Observation
As an EFL teacher, I have come to realize that the social environment, age, perception and more, play a vital role in teaching English. This was evident as I taught the kindergarten section of the school. It required more efforts because of their language background ie. Non-English speaking country. So, the effective method of knowledge transfer to this group of kids must be interactive, demonstrative and fun based.
This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Rebal D. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT.
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English in Focus
Recent studies have shown that there is an increasing demand for learning English in preschool all over the world. However, in this part, some parents have become skeptical about sending their kids to learn a foreign language especially at a young age (3-5) thinking that they are imposing too much pressure on their kids!
But there are absolutely no negative effects associated with learning a second language at a young age because children of this age have strong potential in acquiring an infinite number of new information.
I have been teaching the English language for the past 5years. and my experience teaching it to the kindergarten was challenging, immersive and fun. I made sure that early or quick learners were consistently engaged and involved in different kinds of learning activities to sustain their attention. And I did a follow up on slow learners to enable them to catch up.
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Activity and Methodology
Language Skills: I learned through this course and my personal experience that vocabulary building is an important device in learning a language. This was incorporated into my teaching method. The rule in teaching vocabulary states that “a learner’s receptive vocabulary is much larger than his/her productive vocabulary”. This is to say that, they can usually understand more words than they can actively use. I evaluated my class understanding of English through greetings, introducing myself and asking them to do the same.
Games: Games are engaging activities that enhance learning. I employed this method in teaching the English Language.
Some of the games we played were:
Mime and Action
I did this by saying the words aloud to them when they ask in their native language, for things like (drinking water or going to the bathroom). And as kids love to imitate, it took no time for everyone in the class to start using these simple requests and understand classroom language.
Recently in my class, we were learning about our houses, rooms, what is inside each room and the use of the items there. After talking about our houses and showing different kinds of houses (flat, villa, countryside houses, etc). And asking questions like “do you have a big or small house?” Then I started showing random pictures of items we see in our houses. and I asked them to guess the names of the items I'm showing and in which room can they see it. Afterward, I showed them a picture of a house with rooms and items inside each room.
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We dedicated a day for each room to learn the vocabulary with ease. After a couple minutes of drilling, we started to form a game out of the lesson. The game was about me showing them a room, saying the name and asking about the use of the items they see as I’ll explain in the example below:
Interactive Dialog
- Teacher: This is a bathroom, what is it?
- Students: Bathroom.
- Teacher: What do we use the bathroom for? Do we sleep in the bathroom?
- Students: Noooo (usually)
- Teacher: Do we eat in the bathroom?
- Students: Nooo
- Teacher: Do we go wee in the bathroom? (Imitating how we go to the toilet)
- Students: yeeeesss
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Later I add actions too, so the kids can interact physically as well as in the example below:
I’ll point to the sink and say: What do we use the sink for? And start imitating a hand and face wash. Then point to the shower and ask: what do we use the shower for? And start imitating having a shower… and so on.
It didn’t take long till the kids got it and started to react to it. We sometimes did it as a whole class and as individuals, where kids get to ask each other about the use of certain items in a room.
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