Teach English in Taihe Zhen - Ezhou Shi

THE IMPORTANCE OF VISUALITY AND DRAMA TOGETHER WITH TEACHER'S ROLE AS TEACHING EFL IN A KINDERGARTEN Visuality has an important impact on learners and when it combines with teacher’s drama skill, this creates a lasting learning environment. Teaching EFL in a kindergarten requires to be a teacher who uses his/her mimes and gestures effectively in terms of the use of visuality in the classroom. Due to the student's ages and their just learning a new language in the kindergarten, they will not probably understand everything that the teacher says. Besides they cannot read and write. What should the teacher do? The teacher should focus on listening and speaking activities. He/she should make very simple-structured sentences, on the other hand these expressions should commune with mimes and gestures. Assume that the students are in the Study phase and they will separate the foods into two groups as healthy and unhealthy, and then stick the food pictures to the relevant parts. The teacher has to give some instructions to them before they start and says: “Cut the pictures from the dotted lines.” Without gestures they just look at the teacher, but if the teacher raises his/her two fingers up and wiggles them up and down, and then shows the dotted lines, the students are easily able to understand what the teacher wants them to do due to matching the gesture with the target word, and so the information will be lasting in their minds. After a while, whenever they hear the instruction of ‘cut’, they will have already learned what the verb ‘to cut’ means. As an another example, flash cards are colourful visual materials and appeal to the preschoolers, learners. Let’s suppose that the teacher shows a picture in which a boy touches his ears. Target sentence is ‘Touch your ears’. As the teacher shows the flash card, in the meantime, he/she touches his/her ears and wants the students to do the same thing by saying ‘Touch your ears’. Listening and seeing take place with the gesture, which provides an integral and lasting learning. Teacher should have a lively drama skill if she/she is working in a kindergarten. He/she can make the lesson enjoyable by wearing costumes relevant to the topic or changing his/her voice together with the puppets, and besides can make the learning entertaining. This groups of age are playgroup children and they love to have fun. In addition to this, the teacher must know to teach by amusing the students in the kindergarten. For instance, welcoming the students with a different hat every day. Being an another teacher who has a different tone of voice. These keep the students alive and provide them to be enthusiastic about the learning the target foreign language. I would like to give an example from my teaching experience. We were listening a song that was in Hindi. In the video of the song, there was a teacher who was wearing a red cape, a big hat and strange shoes on his feet. One day, I played that song and went out of the classroom. Next, I took a red blanket on my back and put on a big and silly hat on my head as the teacher did in the video, and then entered the classroom. When they saw me in that way, they surprised and started dancing around me and tried to sing that song with me and always wanted me to play it. The important point was that they tried to sing a Hindi song. That drama show created an excitement about a different language for the students. These kinds of things ensure the students to be interested in and speak the target language. Giving a second example, I always changed my voice in accordance with the role if I was telling the story of the week. One day, I made puppets of the characters in the story using tongue blades for the activity and handed them out to each student, and then wanted them to introduce yourselves sitting face to face like, “Hello, my name is Demir. I am a gorilla and I thumb my chest.” While they were talking with each other, I noticed that they were speaking English by changing their voices as I did in the classroom. What I am trying to say here is that the teacher is a idol for the students. If the teacher endear himself/herself to the students, they can probably love the lesson, too. The more energetic and creative the teacher is, the happier students who are looking at him/her with the excitement of learning the teacher sees. Considering all of these, ‘to see’, ‘to move’, and ‘to talk’ form a wholeness and make the student’s informations lasting. Teacher should keep himself/herself lively and arouse curiosity in order that the students can be interested in learning new language at the early ages. As for as possible, the teacher should use visual materials, do kinaesthetic activities and make them listen and speak English. Total Physical Response (TPR) is the method of teaching language or vocabulary concepts by using physical movement to react to verbal input, which is the most convenient method for the preschoolers as teaching EFL. REFERENCES http://www.theteachertoolkit.com/index.php/tool/total-physical-response-tpr https://esldramagames.com/