Language Survival » Teaching Languages

Teaching kids advertising language

John — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 09:14:33 +0000

Just stumbled across a website called admongo.gov. It’s an American intiative helping kids understand what ads really mean. As ads are part of our everday life (in fact when I look around my computer right now I can see three different ads) it is important for children to understand the ad lingo. So teaching them how advertising works, what advertising is trying you to do etc. will help them make better judgements. They have quite a cool flash-based game that goes through ads (where they are placed, what they try you to do, who is behind the ad). As a player you can collect points. A quite nice idea, I think we adults could probably learn a thing or two as well. Since I am never influenced by advertising I obviously got the perfect score. So: Read my blog or you’ll die (shock ad). Or in nicer words: Read my blog and show me how intelligent you are. And even better (the lynx effect): Read my blog and you’ll become the sexiest man/woman alive.

Image credit: admongo.gov

Teaching languages to an unborn

John — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:48:26 +0000

Yes, you read right. A new study has found out that people should talk in two languages, even when the baby is not born yet. This increases the chances of the baby “liking” both languages. Now, you might ask how you can check whether a baby likes one language more than the other. The answer is quite easy: What does a baby want the most? The method is known as “high-amplitude sucking-preference procedure”. Here’s the entire study.

Image Credit: flickr, BadrNaseem.

Teaching with the Socratic Method

Tyler — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:21:00 +0000

I recently stumbled upon a transcript of a teacher experimenting with the Socratic Method. I was amazed at what happened, and what I read. It wasn’t so much the use of the Socratic Method, but what was being taught.

The idea of teaching children other bases for counting at an early stage is fascinating. Scientists argue that teaching children to count and do math with only 10 as a base limits the potential of our evolution. I would argue a different point. Couldn’t we take a similar approach when it comes to how we teach children about languages and grammar.

Getting children to think in the terms of “how” and “why” when it comes to language seems a lot more helpful than trying to get the children to memorize all irregular verbs, for example. I’ll go back to the math. Children are taught (at least when I was back in school) the times table starting with one and ending with twelve. Then, they have to start over when they reach 13 and learn how to do math properly, although that is done with a calculator in most schools – skipping the nuisance of having to teach it.

The next time I am asked to teach something – I’ll skip the Jeopardy approach and ask questions instead of handing out answers.

image source: Wikipedia