Question:
How would all you ESL teachers compose a lesson that visual, auditory and
tactile ESL learners could grasp? I am learning to be an ESL teacher and
am conscious that there are many learning types out there in the classroom.
I would like advice concerning how to adapt my lessons to meet the needs
of visual, tactile and auditory ESL learners.
Answer:
I love using pictures in the classroom, particularly picture sequences. I
use them to illustrate and to provide practice for grammar points and as
the springboard for thinking, discussion, and writing activities. But you
can use not only pictures that the students see, but also pictures that
they draw; the act of drawing helps them to understand and remember lessons
(just as the act of writing helps students who learn best from verbal
practice). Last spring I told this list about using a visual technique to
try to help students remember the difference between -ing and -ed
participles: They had to draw a picture of a smoked chicken and a smoking
chicken. They drew hilarious cartoons of juvenile delinquent chickens
puffing degenerately on cigarettes. They had a great time trading them
around like baseball cards and guffawing over them. I told them to keep
that card in their notebooks and to look at it whenever they got confused
over the difference. Another take on visual learning is to show a brief
video or a clip of a video that uses no dialogue, or to show it with the
sound cut off. The students must complete some kind of discussion or
writing activity based on what they saw.
It seems that there are so many auditory activities available that I won't
comment on them; and that leaves only tactile activities. By tactile do
you mean kinaesthetic? I may not be sure what this means, but if it means
learning by doing (something nonverbal, something involving motion), could
it include field trips, making things, making videos, making photo collages
(but that would be visual?)? Making a recipe as part of a cultural lesson
or a lesson on quantifiers or sequencing? Doing some kind of physical
activity such as a sport or a hobby and then reporting on how to do it or
reflecting on the experience, or perhaps contrasting it with something that
was already a part of the student's experience? What about performing a
task as a part of a two-person team, preferably with a partner from another
culture, and then writing reflectively on the differences between how each
culture gives directives and what each partner observed in the experience?
Don't know if these ideas are useful, but I hope so. I look forward to
what others say.
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