From Visual Clues, Gestures and Sign Language to Language
Visual clues, gestures, sign language, etc. play a major role in understanding. Most teachers are aware of their usefulness for single words or phrases. Mark will take us through how those can be brought together to really improve understanding in the ESL/EFL classroom and make teaching easier.
The game of the week is the Chair Switch Game. This game gets your young students up and moving and practicing the language you are teaching. This is great for vocabulary review, many question and answer dialogues or whatever you’re teaching.
May 4th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
Hi Eric and Mark,
Many thanks for this insight into your work, your dialogue contains a lot of useful information for anyone who wants to learn languages or works as a language instructor. Especially this podcast about signs and how to use them in the ESL classroom is very good. I often have thought about using signs or even sign language in my training courses and you have been doing it. Great. Do you also have any experience in working with blind students?
Regards
Torsten
May 5th, 2006 at 11:17 pm
Torsten - We’re really glad the podcasts have been helpful. I don’t have any experience working with blind students, but I’ll hunt around and see if I can’t fish up any information on that.
Thanks for listening - Mark
May 6th, 2006 at 5:20 am
Thanks Mark, I’ll keep you posted on this topic too.
May 18th, 2006 at 9:01 am
Hey Guys! Pretty cool website! I really liked your show about using gestures. I have been using ASL for phonics and the Alphabet for awhile now and I think that you might have inspired me to branch out a little bit more.
I do also have a suggestion for dealing with the kid that does not want to sit down during fruit basket. I had a kid doing this once so I took another chair out of the circle to see what would happen. This left two kids standing in the middle for each turn. From this point I concentrated my question (I use play more of a musical chairs and question type game) on the one student that was not being difficult. Sometimes I allowed both kids to answer a question and sometimes I did not ask the difficult student a question at all. He then joined in on the game for a few turns after that before he did it again. This way his antics can be funny for you and the class without this kid taking total control of the game. It is not an ideal solution but it does allow for other students to at least have a chance to talk without this other kid being sedated or ritually koncho’d into submission by his classmates.
May 18th, 2006 at 9:05 am
Thanks for the suggestion, Jason! Very helpful.