REFLECTION | 04 Teacher talk
When listening with young learners we must take into account to different concepts:
TOP-DOWN: when you talk about the general idea.
BOTTOM-UP: when you talk about an specific idea, for example words, phonemes, phrases… It’s when you must pay attention to a particular think. This is why you have to listen properly.
*Important: WORDS ARE NOT ENOUHG! Do NOT overload children with listening activities!!
What can we do as teachers?
Talk to learners in English always.
Introduce learners to other speakers of English: skype, visitors…
Story-telling.
Reading aloud.
Interviews and conversations.
Involve the senses.
Visual back-up as possible (facial expressions, movement, mime, gestures…?
Use of the school and the surroundings
Questionnaires, filling missing information-
Pair dictation (two people or group)
In my class, we did a debate about teacher talk, and one of my mates shared with us this link: http://www.betterlanguageteaching.com/esl-articles/57-teacher-student-talk-time. I really like this article, because its general idea is that the teacher talk time is not the main important think, and for these reason we must expend at least the 80% in students talk time.
In this post I have given the readers a lot of things that teachers can do for the teacher talk time but, related to what is said in the article and following my own principles I really think that teacher talk it is not as important as we think, and we have to be sure that after the teacher talk time it will be a LONG student talk time.
