Tell To Teach

Special tips!

Finally, I wish to include verbatim this wise piece of advice by Carol Gaab:

“There are several critical success factors that help TPRS teachers to maintain instruction comprehensibly in the Target Language and to facilitate a language-rich environment that is conducive to developing lasting fluency.

These same success factors will help any language teacher, regardless of methodology:

1. Use L1 (mother tongue) only as a means to help you stay in the L2 (target language) or as a tool for assessment. Clearly establishing meaning before you begin instruction will help you stay in TL once instruction has begun.
2. Go slowly! Beginners need extra time to process and make meaning of new language structures. Speak slowly and clearly. Teach students how to indicate “I don’t understand” with a simple hand gesture.
3. Satisfy literate students’ craving to see written words. Keep the words posted until students have internalized them.
4. Implement wait-time strategies to prevent fast processors from answering questions too quickly and subsequently interrupting the processing/learning of others.
5. Limit the amount of language (vocabulary) you teach at one time.
6. Provide repetition of those new structures. Providing repetition of a managed amount of vocabulary will help to keep input comprehensible.
7. Teach communicatively. Use gestures, voice inflection, body language, context, pictures, props, re-enactments, and other visual clues to keep things comprehensible in lieu of resorting to use of L1 (mother tongue), which should be used as a last resort. Keeping input comprehensible will reduce/eliminate the need for L1.24”

24 http://www.tprstorytelling.com/images/TPRS-Lang.Mag2011.pdf