- Reflect on your experiences as a language teacher and learning in this latest speed-dating workshop. What difficulties did you encounter? How did you successfully relay concepts that were foreign to your classmates as your students? If you were eventually granted the opportunity to teach a full semester-long course on the target language, what strategies would you adopt?
In preparation for this workshop, I tried to pick something to teach that was short and easy to understand for someone who has never been exposed to Korean before, yet also interesting enough that people who have started learning Korean would want to listen. It is difficult to teach something about a language that doesn't start with the basics to someone who is at the beginner level. In order to make my concepts more understandable, I wrote the words in both Hangul and in a romanized form so everyone could read it. I also opted to use a whiteboard to write out the concepts as I said them because I feel that helps people to better follow what I'm saying.
If I were teaching a foreign language class, there are several strategies I would use. First of all, I would have everyone take the learning test to see how each individual best learns a language and then split them into groups based off of that result. I think textbook learning is important but conversational is very helpful as well, so I would go around and have conversations with the groups, but without a lot of pressure to practice that branch of the language.
I also feel that games are a fun and effective method of teaching that includes having the students repeat what you're saying instead of just listening to an hour of instruction. In my language learning experience, I have also found that songs are very helpful in remembering vocabulary words and grammar usage. Not just practice but frequent practice is definitely key, so I would probably assign a lot of homework that includes more than just reading and writing to make sure the students are exposed to all aspects of the language.
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