I hope you are having a great day. In this post we are going old school. Now when I say “old school,” I mean Sesame Street old school.
(Check out the Cookie Monster as he breaks the word down Sesame Street style)
True, it’s not new. But I shared this clip because although I keep saying that we must develop our skills and knowledge in order to better help our students, this does not mean that we always need to be looking for modern approaches to teaching. Sometimes it means that we need to look to the past and draw from the selection of traditional teaching methods that still provide a huge benefit to the classroom and the learning experience (of course it helps to understand which methods are effective and which ones are not).
To be honest with you, I was reintroduced to this old school approach to teaching pronunciation by my research assistant Tisha after watching her teach a class of 16 Korean middle school students. Her approach involved the above method of teaching pronunciation, but with a little twist. Instead of having the students remain in their seats she divided the students into two groups (or three/four – depending on how many sections the word or phrase was broken up into) and have each group stand at opposite sides of the classroom. The group on the left would say the first part of the word (and then the group on the right would repeat it) before taking a step towards the group on the opposite side of the room. After that the group on the right would say their part (with the first group repeating it) and then take a step towards the first group. Once both groups met in the middle all of the students would say the word. If Tisha deemed the pronunciation to be correct then they would get merit points (based on how many steps it took them and how many attempts) and then repeat the process with the next word. If they mispronounced the word they would need to repeat the process.
The trick was keeping the activity fun. The teacher really needed to pay attention and have fun with the students and set challenges. One way Tisha did this was by telling the students that they could get bonus “points” if they completed the word in less than three steps (it was funny watching the students try to take HUGE steps), or if they made an error they would need to do extra homework (this was said in a joking manner). This homework threat resulted in the children taking smaller steps to have more practice time.
The kids loved it and I hope you love it too.
Have a great day,
Keeping English Real!