Alphabet, Spelling and Young Learners

Being able to spell in English belongs to the ELT basics category. Kids and adults alike learn the English alphabet with the help of the many alphabet songs, practise spelling their names and that’s usually all. They are expected to remember how to spell as it’s considred to be easy. Besides there are so many other important and interesting things to focus on.

I’ve been teaching 1^st graders for 7 years now and admittedly, I have never paid much attention to spelling. 

My 1^st graders have 8 hours of English every week – 4 with me, 4 with my Turkish colleague. My partner teacher uses a coursebook with the students; my job is to supplement and provide opportunities for extra practice.  That leaves us plenty of time for some fun.

Together with my American colleague, who teaches 1C (I teach 1A and B), we decided to spend 1 class a week focusing on a letter of the alphabet (starting with A). It’s been a few months now and this week, for example, we will be talking about the letter N.

Every time a new letter is introduced, the children learn a few words beginning with it. They also complete tasks to distinguish the new letter and practise using it. These include lettersearches where they have to circle e.g. all Bs, giving students pictures and asking which letter things shown in them start with, tracing, races to the board (each team member has to write / touch or circle a letter the teacher says) and so on.

We had a few reservations before conducting our experiment:

•  our students were learning the Turkish alphabet at the same time (not starting with A though) so we were scared they might somehow confuse both alphabets. It does happen but very rarely.
• they learn how to write in cursive whereas most of the books for kids and the handouts we had were written using the so called ‘the ball and the stick’. Students should be familiar with both styles. They sometimes call writing in cursive writing in Turkish and ‘the ball and the stick’ – writing in English. We observed no problems with students being unable to use both styles. 
• we thought it might be too hard and too boring for the students and we were wrong. Spelling is very challenging and my students can’t wait until we learn new letters.

Our main aim was to teach the English alphabet, giving the children an opportunity to pick up some new words, practice reading and writing.

Yet what has been taking place exceeded my expectations. One day, having reached letter H, I decided to give it a try and asked the students to write down a few words I was spelling. The words were DAD, BED, CAT. To my surprise, the students had no major problems with this activity. The following week I showed the kids some new words and asked them to spell these for me. They raised their hands immediately and spelled everything they were supposed to. That was a WOW.

So here we are – spending 40 min a week with 6-7 year olds exposing them to a new letter and a few words beginning with it. After a few months, most students spell a lot better than the students in High School.

Don’t you think it’s an achievement? I do J

Corrective feedback

I’m currently preparing for an ELT conference in Vienna where I’m going to talk about error correction and feedback. To cut a long story short - I need your help to prove that what I’m planning to say is not sheer theory. 

Here are some basic, immediate ways of correcting students’ utterances. You may or may not like them but the truth is we all use them, from time to time and sometimes automatically, during out classes.

My request is for you to spend a few minutes and let me know which technique(s) you use most often to correct your students. Are there some you never use? Can you think of other ways that I, in my ignorance, haven’t mentioned?

I’ll be extremely grateful for your replies J

1. Explicit Correction – Teacher provides the correct form and clearly indicates that what the student had said was wrong.

 e.g.

S ‘Yesterday I go to the cinema’

T ‘Yesterday I went to the cinema’. went is the past form of go. If you talk about yesterday you have to use went not go.

2. Recasts – Teacher reformulates all or part of the student’s utterance.

e.g.

S1 ‘Are you agree with me?’

T ‘Do you agree with me?’

S2 ‘Yes, I agree.

3. Clarification requests – indicate to students that what they said has been misunderstood by the teacher or that the utterance is incorrect in some way. Repetition or reformulation is required from the student and the teacher may use phrases such as: ‘Pardon?’ ‘Excuse me?’

e.g.

T. ‘What did you do yesterday?’

S ‘I play football’

T ‘Excuse me?’

S ‘I played football’

4. Metalinguistic feedback – contains comments and information about the student’s utterance without providing the correct form. Metalinguistic comments indicate that there is an error somewhere but they are also an attempt to elicit the information from the student. Teacher may use grammatical terminology or a word definition.

e.g.

S. She like bananas.

T. What’s the ending of the 3rd person singular when we use Present Simple?

5. Repetition - Teacher repeats student’s erroneous utterance typically by adjusting the intonation to highlight the error. 

e.g.

S. I watch TV in Monday.

T. IN Monday? (rising intonation)

Please, don’t be a lurker and drop me a line :) If you have more time you can also mention the level and age of your students. 

Thanks a million!

Why I like teaching kids

Many EFL teachers say that they hate teaching children. Some even dread entering the classroom as they are scared the monsters will sooner or later overtake and create chaos impossible to control.

Although there surely are disadvantages of teaching Young Learners, I want to focus on all the good points today. So here we go, teaching children is fun because:

·        They are honest and always tell u the truth, no matter how harsh it can be (Teacher, my grandma has the same scarf as you. Teacher you smell funny. Teacher…)

·        They find it very difficult to keep a secret and as a result you may have the opportunity to learn a lot about their parents (My dad NEVER brushes his teeth in the morning.)

·        They are largely unpredictable and you never know what they are up to

·        They are not afraid of making mistakes and try speaking TL as much as they can

·        You never know how the lesson with YLs will end. Somebody crying, somebody climbing up the walls, somebody looking for something in the garbage…

·        They are extremely observant (Teacher - today you are wearing green eye shadow. Why?)

·        Kids are curious of the world and eager to learn. My students, for example, love to learn where certain animals come from (So koalas come from Australia??? Not Africa???)

·        They are fascinated with facts about the world and love sharing their knowledge with the teacher (Did you know that ‘fire brigade’ begins with ‘f’? No! Really?)

·        Kids would be the best journalists as they are not scared to ask any questions (Are you pregnant? How much do you earn?)

·        They are easy to convince (If you are naughty, you’re gonna get a terrible stomach ache! Ok, I don’t say that but feel tempted very often.)

·        They like sharing their secrets with you so you end up knowing who has a crush on who and that one of your students got a message from Hanna Montana on Facebook. Wow!

·        They easily make you laugh. Most of the time.

·        They give you a daily portion of exercise and help you keep fit – if you teach YLs, count how much of the classroom time you can actually spend sitting down!


I'd love to hear some nice stories from you as well :)            
See, even writing about kids makes me smile :)