The world continues to develop ways of teaching, trying to master this art and create the optimal learning environment for the students. Through various modalities and scenarios such as online platforms, in-person lessons, one-on-one/private tutoring, to groups of over 10 students. While each situation has its perks, there can also be some disadvantages as well. After opening my own small English teaching business in Germany, I had developed my own styles and methods of teaching. I have preferred group sizes, styles, jokes, rapport building activities. I have found through my own experiences, and research in articles and books, that incorporating learning into everyday activities can give people one of the most natural and optimal experiences to gather and retain new information.
Embedded Teaching
I would argue that the most effective way to teach a language, is to apply it to a person’s everyday life. This concept is called embedded teaching. In embedded teaching for language, the teacher would use everyday tasks (i.e. brushing teeth, cleaning up, playing, putting on your shoes, etc.) as a chance to teach the children (Pramling et al., 2019).
Based on my own experiences,
the children who were taught everyday during daily tasks to speak English, were more successful at becoming fluent, than those who attended a lesson once or twice a week for an hour. The children in a Tagespflege (German daycare) who were under the age of 5, had better English than most of the teenagers I worked with once or twice a week. Why? Because language learning during daily activities, like playing or eating, is easier to remember because of repetition and importance for communication to fulfil the child’s needs.
Review for Dr. Sonja Eisenbeiß
Dr. Sonja Eisenbeiß is a linguistics professor and researcher at the University of Köln. She is interested in language acquisition and designing sustainable systems in her gardens. She believes in language acquisition through play and uses nature to help her students learn. I found the idea of using nature and plants to learn language intriguing, so I went to her website to look up information about her ideas:
https://www.sprache-spiel-natur.de/category/sprache/
By applying language learning to gardening, she was able to teach through flower names, plant care, and other aspects of keeping a healthy garden. It is a unique perspective on teaching that incorporates natures into language learning! I enjoy gardening and have many plants inside my apartment, but through this presentation I realized that these plants contain the names of animals, you can work on adjectives, prepositions, vocabulary words, past tense, sequencing events, following directions, etc. The possibilities are endless with such a broad genre.
Food For Thought:
It would be interesting to brainstorm the possibilities for the types of language that you could teach with this category, and then create a portfolio of two activities for each type. She discussed in her lecture the infinite ideas you could come up with for teaching people using nature, and an expansion on this idea would be helpful and influential for other teachers looking to enhance their children’s learning through nature.
Conclusions
Finally, I enjoyed her interest in creating a fun atmosphere, and her wish to create a better environment by using nature to guide her students into learning both language and nature. In the future, I will stay connected and learn more about sustainable environments being used as a teaching tool for language. As a teacher, I will also try to create my own ideas that are flexible enough to teach multiple areas of language and apply this to my future classes.
Please check out her webpage linked above, and enjoy her thoughts on language teaching and ecology! :) I am linking the sources for my article below.
Bye! :)
Bibliography
Pramling, N., Wallerstedt, C., Lagerlöf, P., Björklund, C., Kultti, A., Palmér, H., . . . Samuelsson,
I. P. (2019). Play-responsive teaching in early childhood education. Cham, Switzerland:
Springer Open. Retrieved January 8, 2021
Eisenbeiss, V., Dr. (n.d.). Sprache Archive. Retrieved January 08, 2021, from
https://www.sprache-spiel-natur.de/category/sprache/