Teaching Creative TEFL
After I started teaching, I started employing a new teaching method called drilling. It is to expand other related words or sentences based on the words the students have learned. For example, this class teaches 6-year-old children to learn 5 new words (brushing teeth, sleeping bag, chocolate, hiking, jogging). I will create a summer camping scene. In this scene, I will bring in some new words to complete the story. Set the mood and stage, they will easily grasp the content.
Later, I also invented a whiteboard scoring method by writing the children’s names to the whiteboard in order according to their seats. Based on the answer rate, pronunciation and classroom performance, they will be rewarded a star every 5 times. Finally, the student who gets the most stars will be able to exchange a secret gift. I call this experiment the Hidden Candy. Because it not only motivates the students, but also helps me manage the classroom and make the naughty kids settle down. I found that even after the class ended, I didn’t have real gifts for them. The child is still very happy to play with me again. This shows that rewards in psychology terms can produce positive results.
The Hidden Candies method is also very effective to use on older children (12-15 years old). The focus is to let them use their imagination: what if they have to survive on an adventurous island, build their own shelter, hunt for food, ect The reward is the final result based on their unique thinking and expressions. In order to sum up the story with hidden rewards, students are tuned to naturally increase their vocabulary bank through their own imagination and actively exchange and learn new languages.
