DIARY OF AN ENGLISH TEACHER
Green Pepper or Green Paper?
Taking on new perspectives of your language
If you think that teaching younger learners is a piece of cake, think again. The students that I teach may be energetic and excited to learn and use English (and I love that attitude), but some days I tend to compare myself to a faulty phone battery — the one that drains faster than usual and requires maintenance. That is not because I was made to run around all day and speak an octave higher at all.
One of the things that teachers do is repeat themselves. It sounds like a complete bore. However, repetition is an inevitable routine especially in language acquisition. Particularly in countries where the second language learned in school is not common like Japan, repetition becomes an effective way to pick up a new language. There is a reason why teachers start with greetings and warm-ups before classes all the time. It is a habit to ensure students become familiar with certain target languages. When I first taught a class of monolingual nine-year-old English as a Second Language (ESL) students, I noticed that they would automatically repeat everything you say that is not their language.
Teacher: Good morning, everyone!
Students: Good morning, everyone!
Depending on how often lessons are held, it can take about half a year (true story) for young learners to understand how to answer a greeting in the language they are learning. The teachers and I were repeating the correct answer every class for months. The trick is to also be creative with your effort such as using songs with tunes that students enjoy. The final product is where you see your effort’s worth — after weeks and weeks of repetition. One of my best memories is listening to the entire class chorusing the sentences naturally. Believe me when I say it feels like you are over the moon sipping on champagne.
However, that is not how a teacher makes it in life. One achievement is equivalent to a grain of rice in a sack. That is because if you stop following up or forgetting to do so, new information can fade away because it is not ingrained in them. The marriage of patience and consistency becomes a combination to maintain throughout your teaching career. What is worse is when the wrong thing is learned, you have to put in extra time to correct them while being sensitive to their feelings at the same time — and that is because you should. I got mad at my students once and that experience is living in me forever. I remember their faces. I remember the pin-drop silence of the classroom as I expressed my disappointment. Most of all, I remember how terribly I felt after storming out of the classroom. It took a good, long year for me to build rapport with them again.
Another way to teach with the art of repetition is to provide relevant context on the mistakes that they made. The topic can be as simple as fruits and vegetables. This is the perfect opportunity for you to rethink your role as a speaker of the language. I taught an elementary class of nine- to ten-year-olds about vegetables one day. The teacher asked me to pronounce the word “green pepper”. Mind you, this was a really fun class where they immediately speak out as they try to imitate what I say. I must tell you that the findings made me so curious as an English teacher. This is how the class went:
Teacher 1: How do you say this in English?
Me: Green pepper
Students: Green paper?!
Me: No, green PEP-per.
Students: Oh, green pepp-aaa.
Me: Listen again. Green PEP-PER.
Students: Got it! Green PAPA!
Disclaimer: Evaluate the environment of the classroom before you implement your teaching style. If they take jokes well, by all means go ahead and have fun. However, if you have students who are not confident with speaking, encourage them more and be careful of reactions that might kill their confidence.
While this experience was entertaining, it helped me to learn more about my students and why they mishear or struggle to pronounce certain words. From there, it became easier to build lessons and drills for them to correct mistakes. In this class, I used flashcards of pictures that showed what they pronounced. I turn my back towards them and hold up the card of the word that I hear as they pronounce it. This is also a good method to assess learning.
Normally, students would thank you for the lesson at the end of the class, but I feel that I should be the one thanking them every time too. You never know what you will learn about your language from their point of view — particularly a language that you have been using naturally throughout your life.
