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Introduction
The children you teach are already learning, but would you like to help them even
more, especially those who seem to be struggling?
It's no secret that some children learn much faster than others and that this soon
leads to imbalanced levels among classmates. The strugglers may appear to be
uninterested in English or, stated positively, much more interested in everything
else other than English. We can imagine such a child's point of view. His life is
being interrupted by the English lesson. He usually has two choices about how to
cope with this. Change his classroom environment, or ignore that environment. To
ignore it, he'll use his imagination to think of other things, people and places.
To change it, he'll try to make your lesson more 'fun' - based on his own definition
of 'fun' of course, - often not what you were hoping to have happen in
your lesson! Whichever course he chooses, the end result is he's not learning well,
he's not remembering.
To help, and such children do need help, the teacher can use memory-friendly
teaching techniques. Over recent years, memory experts have written many books
containing practical ideas on improving memory. These memory experts, such as Harry
Lorayne, apply the principles of memory to produce results that amaze others. During
my ten years of teaching in Japan, I have sometimes noticed children naturally using
some of these same memory techniques. Teachers too, soon learn that certain teaching
methods boost children's memory.
Most of the following memory principles you will already know, but I set them out
here as a kind of checklist for you to refer to. Through this, I hope we teachers
can help more of the 'strugglers' in children's English classes throughout Japan.
Movement, and Peripheral Learning
Yuri, a 3 year old girl, was again rushing past, behind the group of other
kindergarten children who were sitting on the mat. She was on her way to climb yet
another of the curtains in the hall where we had our 45-minute weekly English
lesson. "Eating", she called out as she flew by. To my amazement she had
correctly identified the picture card I was showing the class. I'd introduced it,
among others, while she was seemingly occupied elsewhere with her gymnastic feats.
The children on the mat hadn't yet remembered it. Yuri had. How come?
Two principles of memory were at work here. Movement, and peripheral
learning. For children, movement is a great memory reinforcer. Songs which
include movement (songs such as, 'I like Running' or, 'Head, shoulders, knees and
toes') help children remember the song's vocabulary. Even without music, Total
Physical Response instructions like, "stand up, sit down, sleep, wake up, open
the door" are also quickly remembered as children carry out the actions.
The second, lesser known principle is that of peripheral learning. The vocabulary
card, 'eating' wasn't at the center of Yuri's attention that day! It was on the
outside edge, on the periphery. One of the theories of accelerated learning is that
people can even remember things that they are scarcely aware of learning. Our minds
are continually taking in information from our surroundings even though we don't
always notice. Until I mention it for example, you may not have been paying much
attention to the background sounds you can hear right now, or to what is in your
field of vision other than this text. The point is that children don't always focus
on what the teacher is teaching when the teacher is teaching it. Rather, they are
also able to pick things up 'on the fly' from their environment, things such as
chance remarks, English in the background, or background visuals such as wall
posters. By definition, 'peripheral' items cannot be the focus of your teaching, but
for the sake of those whose attention wanders, you can create your background
classroom environment to support your teaching.
Color
When I first started teaching young children, I felt guilty when we gave them
'coloring time' to color their workbook pictures. We should be teaching, I
thought. But color is one of the most powerful aids to memory. Coloring is NOT a
waste of time. (It also includes movement, another aid to memory.) If you have the
children repeat relevant vocabulary while they are coloring, you will be enhancing
their learning.
This principle of color as an aid to memory also needs to be taken into account
when selecting course materials, such as flashcards, posters and textbooks. British
publishers seem to be the recent leaders for providing bright, bold colors. Colors
attract. Just what the strugglers need. Choose your materials well, and a great
deal of your teaching will be done for you by the power of the colors.
Sound
I've already mentioned the teaching power of songs. Any children's teacher who
excludes music from her class is putting some students at a disadvantage. Beyond
songs, your voice is one of the most potent teaching tools you have to enhance
learning. '"FEE, FI, FO, FUM", boomed the giant. He was a-n-g-r-y!' You
can use your voice to great effect in telling stories such as this 'Jack and the
Beanstalk'. Children pick up a more complete meaning of the word 'angry' through
the acted, added emotion of your voice. Like a hot knife through soft butter, such
words slip easily into memory. Getting children to imitate you and use their own
voices to add emotional expression to vocabulary words can help their interest and
therefore help their memory.
Rhythm and rhyme are other strong devices for promoting better memory. Many
teachers will already be familiar with such children's materials produced by
writers like Carolyn Graham. Why not produce your own local rhymes and rhythms,
making them relevant to the particular children you teach?
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