Moslem teachers.
Alhamdulillah, God still give us opportunity to learn and one of them by giving me to write this article. OK, our topic is now about how to teach English for children.
We all know that English has become a universal anguage. Many countries have used English as their second languages, where some others use it as a foreign language. In Indonesia, English has become a popular language and children were been taught in English at their school.
Teaching English to children is not an easy job, but it also not difficult, if we already know how to do it. Below are several things you may consider if you want to teach English to children.
1. Know your studentFirst thing to do before you teach is to know your student. Different child has different character. Teaching a 3 years old child will be different with teaching a 5 years old child. The younger a child, the shorter length of attention span he/she has. If you teach 3 years old children, you have to be aware that they cannot concentrate or sit still more than 10 minutes. That’s why you have to prepare many activities and it should be interesting for them.
2. No translationThere is tendency for us to translate a word or even a sentence to our students. Especially after we spoke several sentences and we saw many confused faces in front of us. Well, frankly speaking, translation is not a good method to teach a language. Once we do translation, they will think that they don’t have to try to understand the language and they will just wait because they know that we will translate it anyway.
3. Use a lot of gesture or pictureInstead of translation, it is better for us to use gesture or picture to explain. For example, if we want to ask our students to sit, we can say “Please, sit down” and act it out.
4. Being cheerfulCheerfulness is one important thing we need to show to our students. Believe it or not, the positive energy from our cheerfulness will be transferred to our students.
5. PersevereNever give up. That’s the key. Always try and look for different methods or way of teaching to help your students to be able to speak in English. Children have different way of learning and we need to try as many methods as we can. One size doesn’t fit to all.
So, anybody interested to teach English to children?
By Abu Adil