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muffintop
Joined: 07 Jan 2013
Posts: 803
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 Posted: Mon Sep 02, 2013 8:20 am Post subject: |
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| Shroob wrote: |
| muffintop wrote: |
A class I have just memorized a short dialogue for school...which doesn't start until tomorrow.
Boy: Do you use chopsticks in England?
Girl: No, we don't. They are hard for English people. We use a knife and fork.
Boy: Oh, it's hard for Chinese people.
Girl: It's easy for English people.
Boy: Do you use chopsticks in England?
Girl: No, we don't. We use a knife and fork.
I changed the question to....
Do you use a knife and fork in China?
......
.....
.....
...........and got blank stares for 5 minutes.
Whoever said they only learn how to make English noises is spot on. Granted these are kids but....wow. |
It's crap like this that wants me to bang my head against the wall when I hear the question, 'Can you use chopsticks?' |
Yeah me too. This is right out of the book they use for school verbatim. |
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FreakingTea
Joined: 09 Jan 2013
Posts: 167
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| Posted: Wed Sep 04, 2013 1:08 pm Post subject: |
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| roadwalker wrote: |
I've started writing my own dialogues for this term instead of correcting the dialogues in the books. Memorizing the dialogues in the books would mostly be useless, but I think there is a place for dialogues in an oral English class. I still remember short bits from high school French and English classes. I think memorized chunks are good for helping them use patterns.
After dialogues though, the students should be given a chance to create scenes or situations using similar vocabulary. Or have discussions around the vocabulary used in the dialogue. I notice my stronger students have little problem with that, while others use the dialogue as a pattern much more strictly. That's ok, but I will try to nudge those latter students a bit. If it builds confidence, don't discount it out of hand. |
This is good to hear. It's basically what I was thinking of doing. |
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haleynicole14
Joined: 20 Feb 2012
Posts: 178
Location: US
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| Posted: Thu Sep 05, 2013 5:27 pm Post subject: Re: Having them memorize short dialogues, any success? |
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| FreakingTea wrote: |
| I'm asking because this is pretty much how I learned Japanese. We would memorize a dialogue before every class, then recite it and do drills based on the grammar point. As a more introverted learner, I gained a lot from this approach. It made me very confident in my speaking and it ensured good grammar. |
I've had the same kind of success with teaching myself some Mandarin and Spanish. Granted, my Mandarin is nowhere near great, but a lot of what I remember is from phrases in songs or poems. I've got a few children's songs posted around the house where I see them regularly, and know certain phrases just because I've read and repeated them so many times. Similarly, I listen to podcasts over and over, and have entire phrases that pop into my head from those when I'm writing or speaking. In the end it all amounts to repetition and practice, which is the foundation for any learning. Chinese students learn to read with these types of poems and songs so it shouldn't be anything too unusual for them.
Repetitive readings are regarded as a very effective way to encourage fluency in reading education, since they build confidence and familiarity. A lot of the research that I've found on it is for elementary students who are learning to read, and the students that I've done repeated readings with do seem to enjoy it. But, for older students, you would have to weigh effectiveness with boredom if it's something they are complaining about. Also, this is different from pure memorization, but only in that they still have the text in front of them. With enough repetition, it becomes memorized anyway. And teachers can ensure that the students actually know what they're saying, which would be important for ELLs. Like the OP said, you could feature grammar points from the text, switching out words to show how the grammar is relevant in other situations. In a super simple example, the structure of "Mary had a little lamb" could be used in a lesson as "Mary had a ___ lamb" for adjectives or "Mary had a little ___" for nouns.
Here an article I found online about repeated readings (the link will open a .pdf):
http://mahslanguagearts.wikispaces.com/file/view/Incorporating+Fluency+Instruction+in+Class.pdf |
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