Archaic language and speaking activities for children

One of the things that caught my interest in this week's reading was the chapter on 'Developing Children's Listening and Speaking in ESL'. Before I read the chapter I didn't think I would be interested in it, but I ended up connecting with it because I did many of these same activities when I was in pre-school and kindergarten. I am not sure if many of the activities I did were intended to improve our listening or speaking, but I assume this is what some of them were meant for (also for memory as well). 

An example of one of these activities was the Haunted House listening activity I did in pre-school. The gist of this activity was that our teacher would play a record (yes an actual one) that told a story and we were to act out what was going on in the story as we listened to it. She had a collection of these records, but in the Haunted House one we would start by stomping our feet in place as we walked, then if the narrator said we went under/over/around/or through something we would act it out. As the story progressed we made it under branches, over walls, around ponds, and through vines until we made it to Dracula's lair. As soon as this happened we would then run as fast as we could back the way we came doing the exact same under/over/around/or through motions in order to get back to safety. All of this was done in place and after we had become familiar with one of the records (these were done maybe a couple times a week) we would then sing along with the directions that the narrator would give. This is somewhat similar to the HOT DOG song on pg. 142 in MCM. I think that activities like this are useful because not only are they memorable, but students often see them just as something fun to do instead of as boring drill exercises.

The other thing that I wanted to mention was the idea of using songs and stories with archaic language in them (MCM 143). I thought that the author made a good point when they said that the students understand that this language isn't usually used in English and so they don't adopt it in their speech. I agree, if we did change some of the language in these songs and stories I think that we wouldn't be allowing our ESL students to engage with the same cultural materials that many native-speaking children use. This won't hurt their language abilities, but they may miss out on some important cultural information.

A note about Feb. 23rd

At the beginning of class last week Kizuna and I gave our presentation on Oral Language Development. I think that the discussion portion of our presentation (which followed Kizuna's introduction on speaking difficulties for non-native English speakers) went better than planned. We didn't cover all of our discussion questions, but I think that the class came up with some very good points about speaking that I hadn't anticipated (i.e. body language and outside factors that affect our speech or willingness to produce it). The discussion went so well that Kizuna and I were unaware that our time was almost up and so we had to cram in our last activity. This definitely had an effect on how we gave our instructions and how the class perceived/understood the activity, but even so I think that the activity wasn't a total loss because it got the class to discuss some important ideas about how people communicate from more than one point of view.

After that we went to the GLL. Since many of our computers weren't working properly we ended up doing two activities. One was an assessment of two ESL students from a video and the other activity was to create activities for our students using props and games from the library's teaching section. I think that it was interesting to see how each of the lessons had to be changed last week because challenges like this often come up in classrooms and we have to be prepared to adjust our lessons and even throw out some of our planned activities.