Language Teaching

Today is finally the day to show the result of our language learning project; we have to teach two other groups some basic knowledge of the language we learn, that is, Turkish. And we’ll also receive two different language classes from them. But before the class starts, we don’t know what languages the other teams will teach, so I think it’s quite exciting.

For today’s teaching, we prepare three different parts, Turkish alphabets, introduce ourselves and Turkish cuisines. For alphabets, we have our classmates listen to an alphabet song and remind them some special pronunciation; for introducing ourselves, we teach them six basic short sentences, design card games for them to put right order of sentence together, and create a jazz chant to help them memorize the context. For Turkish cuisine, which is what I’m in charge of, I pick five Turkish foods to introduce and teach them how to pronounce them and use the words in a sentence.

During the process of preparing, I feel that it’s not difficult to teach, but we have to make some efforts to design activities to help our students learn effectively and without boredom. While we were thinking about how to teach introducing ourselves, I said how about we made a jazz chant like the video teacher showed us a few weeks ago? My teammates looked at me unbelievably as if I was insane. But I still wanted to give it a try, so I looked up some videos on Youtube about jazz chant; and at last, I found an easy rhythm that could apply to the Turkish sentences. Seeing this might work, my teammates joined me, and we designed our own Turkish jazz chant together, which I think is a really delightful and satisfactory moment. Maybe we’re the first one in Taiwan to teach Turkish through jazz chant!

On today’s teaching, to be honest, comparing to group 1, I think we still have some  room for improvement. The alphabets are a bit too much; hence, it’s a little boring and hard to remember all. The other two groups didn’t teach the alphabets, and I feel that it’s not a big problem; we could still pronounce the words without knowing each alphabets. I think we might have chosen the wrong strategy, but it’s ok, at least we help our students to understand the most fundamental knowledge of Turkish. In addition, on Jazz chant, although our classmates participate in it and it did help them to create deeper memory on the sentences, I think we could be more organized and think of other ways to sing it more interestingly. So, I hope we could make some improvement and do it better next week.

However, I think I enjoyed myself a lot on teaching; I used to think I have no interest in teaching, but after this class, I changed my heart a little bit. I never knew that teaching could be this interesting!

The two other teams taught French and Korean, and I think among the three groups, French group did the best. They taught French in correct pronunciation and played a game to help us remembering the words, which I think is quite successful. On the other hands, the Korean team didn’t have many fun activities, but I still enjoy it a lot because I crave Korean food, and I’m happy that I learned many of them today!