Hi everyone, I hope you all are doing good and having a fabulous weekend. I have been handed over the baton to run this blog this week so please bear with my stupid pun jokes that may follow. However I will be trying to do my best to maintain the standard set by my predecessors.
I have been a non native speaker of English, who has been taught through out the life in a deductive manner. In the past few years I got a chance to teach non native speakers too and succeeded in giving good results.
My biggest concern since I have joined TESOL program has been that I will be unable to balance the two parts well, that is inductive and deductive. It was also mentioned in the last class, errors that make ELL students stand out like using the wrong form of the verb and many more. I have seen in the past during my teaching experience that this is the most challenging thing to over come in ELLs.
Now lets brainstorm and think of activities and techniques in class to make the deductive learning fun.
How do you think my friends will it be effortless and fun for us to teach our students inductively the deductive material?
Looking forward to your amazing answers.....
I have been a non native speaker of English, who has been taught through out the life in a deductive manner. In the past few years I got a chance to teach non native speakers too and succeeded in giving good results.
My biggest concern since I have joined TESOL program has been that I will be unable to balance the two parts well, that is inductive and deductive. It was also mentioned in the last class, errors that make ELL students stand out like using the wrong form of the verb and many more. I have seen in the past during my teaching experience that this is the most challenging thing to over come in ELLs.
Now lets brainstorm and think of activities and techniques in class to make the deductive learning fun.
How do you think my friends will it be effortless and fun for us to teach our students inductively the deductive material?
Looking forward to your amazing answers.....
Hi Vipasha,
ReplyDeleteThis is a great question. I would mix up my teaching methods.
On the days that I am teaching deductively I would explain what the rule is, model with examples and then perform a check for understanding. For example, if I were teaching verb tense I might give a list of words where the general rule would be add “ing” to the root word for the present tense and add “ed” to the root word for the past tense.
Play-playing-played.
Stay-staying-stayed.
Punch-punching-punched.
Laugh-laughing-laughed.
After doing this I would then give standard paper work exercises such as fill in the blanks, draw a line to the correct word, circle the correct answer, etc. Then you can move into verbal exercises using dialogues switching from present tense to past tense. Students can work in partners and use dialogues such as this...
Pick
Q: What are you doing at the farm?
A: I am picking berries.
Q: What did you do at the farm?
A: I picked berries.
Play
Q: What is Tommy doing?
A: He is playing with his friends.
Q: What did Tommy do?
A: He played with his friends.
On days that I am teaching inductively I may use acting or role playing. If I was performing a lesson on verb tense I would act out the verbs in different tenses without giving the students the rule. See if the students can figure out what the rule is by noticing. It would go something like this....
I would play with toys and say “I am playing with my toys.”
I would play with my toys then stop and sit down then say “I played with my toys.”
I would laugh continuously and in between laughs say “I am laughing.”
I would laugh then stop and say “I laughed so hard.”
I would punch a punching bag continuously and say “I am punching the bag.”
I would punch a punching bag then stop ans say “I punched the bag.”
You can also use inductive teaching spontaneously as the opportunity arises. For example if a student in class says “I likes apple pie.” You could point to him and say “He likes apple pie.” Then point to yourself and say “I like apple pie.” Put emphasis and slow down when you say the words “likes” and “like” so the difference can be heard and noticed. You are showing by example without explaining what the rule is. If you do this enough throughout your time with the student the hope is that they are shown so much that they will eventually acquire the language.
Another thought is that as you get to know your students better you can plan your lessons accordingly. Teach spontaneously and inductively as the occasion arises. If you notice the same issues arising then you can plan a future lesson deductively.
I'm looking forward to reading other thoughts and suggestions because this is a really good question.
Cheers,
Rod
Wow Rod, that is an excellent way that you have put it. And from your previous class seminar I think you are wonderful at implementing practical fun to the theory. However I think, like Marc suggested, that this will be very different depending on the literacy level and the education background.
DeleteBut it is something really interesting and I think can be used at all levels with a few changes here and there.
Hi, Vipasha and Rod,
ReplyDeleteGreat posts and great points!
Sure, a blending way based on communicative approach as mentioned by Rod works better. However, GRAMMAR, could be specifically and systemically taugt to the students depends on their profilings.
Grammar, especially English grammar, in my personal view, is highly tainted with the tint of human-manual (Euclidian-logical) engineering, perhaps partially thanks to its alphbetic-phonic property. I mean, if you had been appointed the designer/creator of the language and given 26 alphebets, and expected to create a linguistic system to discribe all the phenomina of the universe, which might mean millions of words, billions of pages of information and trillions of transactions, a mathematical/logical/Euclidian/mechanical-scientific way must have been involved.
In this way, complicated and self-puzzling rules were created such as aspect, tense, inflections, voice, mood, formula like syntactic structure (such as those for complex-compound sentences) were created.
In contrast, Chinese words originate from simplified pictures. The ancient Chinese drew simply pictures to mimic things. For the Sun, we drew a circle with a point in the middle. For the Moon, we drew the crescent graph. However, for complicated phenomena, pictures are not easy to be created to represent them. Thus, creating words and writing words already consumed majority of the energy of ancient elite Chinese. Little redundancy energy left for them to play dandy and fancy tricks on language itself.
As as result, Chinese language never bothers itself with aspect, inflections, mood, voice, tense, relative pronouns, mathematical-formula for syntactic structures. Chinese language directly comes down to ground. All the suicidally puzzling grammar rules were never humanly engineered, yet, we get away with all things happen in the universe.
And, for Chinese language, 3000-5000 words are used in modern times. All other terms, idioms, phrases are created by put words together in a sequence. Yet, each word keeps its form and its pronunciation. Each word have only one syllable.
For English, so far, there are at least 1.3-1.5 million words there with single or multiple syllables.
So, rules...grammar rules...pronunciation rules...all they things are almost never exist for Chinese learners, though they have to spend tremendous efforts to memorise and practice the Chinese picture characters.
So, for a native Chinese who learns English,grammar rules, phonics rules, over-drilling, over-memorisation, over-learning are the preliminary . No pain, no gain. Any short-cut for adult learners? I am afraid, no. For younger one who lives immersed in English environment, perhaps yes. They can acquire it without resort to their first language.
Correction: taugt = taught at 1st para.
DeleteReplace the first sentence of the last paragraph with:
So, for a native Chinese who learns English, mastery of grammar rules and phonics rules, over-drilling, memorisation, over-learning are the preliminary and effective weapons.
In fact, in my younger days, I learned grammar rules by took them as math formula. At least, it could help me for written English, quite efficently.
DeleteI don't mean to eulegize the old sweat-house way of language learning. I mean, sometimes you have to say, learning English for an adult Asian, just like bodybuilding. You are not expected to be a Swachiniger like muscle man by just running around your backyard 3 laps a week.
ReplyDeleteSchwarzenegger
DeleteIsaac this is a brilliant insight and I must say that I have to agree with this. Being a non native speaker myself I think grammar has to be taught by rules and there is no short cut to this.
DeleteBut, I have to say that I am going to experiment to teach even grammar in a non inductive manner as long as it makes sense to the students.
also, like mentioned I think this approach will vary from level of students and purpose of learning the language too.
great to have your point of view and I must say you write very well :)
Hi my beautiful smart Indian friend,
ReplyDelete(Am I right? I'm talking about the order of the adjectives; is it in the correct order?)
This is the way I teach the grammar to my Persian students. First I start with a text something like a story and focus on the only special thing that I want to teach like tense and after the story I give them some drills and practice to work with their short term memory and after all I teach the rules directly and I work with their long term memory. My students satisfaction about their learning gives me positive feedback about this method.
Thanks for choosing such a great topic for this week.
Well Nadia, this seems like a very effective approach. so what you do is incorporate the grammar at a later stage and first just go with the practise. I cant wait to try it first hand
DeleteYes my dear, it seems that the students have the potential of trying some new approaches because they themselves like to test and try different ways of learning. They like to talk about new events and new methods their teacher use, so as long as they are OK with new methods, we as teachers are allowed to be prepared for trying new methods. Yes! Try my suggestion and give me your feedback.
DeleteWhen I consider ways to make any class "fun", I start with the idea of "student engagement". Regardless of what I'm teaching, I want to consider what I can do to engage my students in the learning process. Engagement means many different things to different people. So you have to consider the following:
ReplyDelete-age level of the students
-current education level
-literacy level
-reasons why they are taking the class (learning from you)
-potential outcomes of the lesson (your objectives)
By considering these factors, you can tailor the engagement level more directly to the needs of the class.
More to come...
Hi everyone,
ReplyDeleteHere's an activity I came across for using the inductive approach for teaching past tense. It involves having the class read a passage that has a number of verbs in past tense, -ed ending. Students discuss the reading in terms of time and when events occur and then identify verbs related to past events. This provides an opportunity for students to notice a pattern related to verb endings.
I also found a piece on inductive versus deductive instruction and the importance of "noticing" that was useful. See
http://www.educ.ualberta.ca/staff/olenka.bilash/best%20of%20bilash/inductivedeductive.html
Dianne
Years ago, I volunteered to teach illiterate adults who already spoke English. Admittedly, it helps to start with someone who already has an ear for the language, but I found that getting students to write and read their own stories was very helpful for inductive learning. I would start by asking them to write down a brief biographical story. Depending on their ability, this might be a few sentences with coaching or a few rough paragraphs. Then I would ask them to read the story out loud and try to self-identify any problems they noticed. Sometimes, it was also helpful for them to listen to me reading a text out loud.
ReplyDeleteFrom this, we would choose one or two issues to work on. We might do some exercises and then play a game. Switching back and forth between written (or visual) and spoken texts really seemed to help them grasp the concepts. It was also helpful to embed the lesson in material they had created themselves. We might work on various aspects of their story until it was polished to a point of pride.
I found that both reading out loud and listening to me read out loud provided fertile “comprehensible input” for them to notice how grammar and syntax changes meaning in a text. Reading just about anything out loud and discussing it really seemed to help.
The other trick I like is to mix up your approaches so they don’t get too overwhelmed with the formal deductive lessons. Games, pictures, humour, and embedded context all seem to help students understand concepts and develop hooks to remember them.