more thoughts.

[parasitegirl]

I woke up at 12:30 at night and was kept awake until 5;15am thinking about parallels in learning about music for dance and what it is I do as a language teacher. This means I will be less than my best today as a teacher, but hopefully better at teaching down the road. There will be more later but it will also include this:

I am an English teacher, but I don't teach English at my job. I teach my students how to learn a new language (and why they might want to).It is only once they know that will they be able to learn English (or any other language).

Listening is important. It is only once you begin to understand what you are hearing that you can start to figure out how to respond. Communication isn't about giving a command and getting a set response, it is about understanding the prompt and figuring out how to respond.

You do have to drill language and grammar eventually, in order to speed up your understanding, response, and prompt generating time and to have a wide array of ways you can respond and responces you can understand, but drilling isn't the same as learning.

Comments

[bintblue.livejournal.com]

Yeah I regularly trip on the fact that both my jobs are so damn similar (teaching language and teaching dance). I have done some writing about it, look forward to your thoughts and future conversation.

[peanutlovelove.livejournal.com]

One of the great things and the greatest faults of the Asian learning system is it's emphasis on drilling. You're right drilling is meant to be for reinforcement, not introduction.

There seems to be 1 way of thinking about learning: do it and do it and do it again. Which *does* work for math, science or other predictable subjects.

And it does work for some areas of language. Conjugation for example-when done properly. The problem is you get students and teachers who try to memorize and then drill absolutely everything.

[parasitegirl.livejournal.com]

Drilling only works for math and other subjects after the way of understanding the basic conceptsand way of learning has been taught, whch the Japanese school also teach early on...I've been in those classes as an assistant. But so much ground work us done at home, pre-elementary ,that it doesn't take as much time. I remind teachers of that when I have to explain why were doing what we are doing and why English takes so much more prep time.

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

Yup.