You must familiarise yourself with the following grammar pages!
This is important as you will be teaching it in the mornings.
You will have to slow down your speaking speed a great deal and simplify your English. An Italian pupil’s English is made up of some 50 – 400 words. A nine-year old understands simple words like dog, football, and teacher. A 12-year old will not understand expressions like ‘ I’d like to show you’ – ‘It’s cool’ or ‘He scored a goal’. You will find yourself having to repeat the same word, expression or sentence more than once.
Your facial expressions, gestures, tone and volume of voice, your vicinity to the pupils, emotional sounds you utter (e.g wow! Oh ? yeah!), physical contact ( touching their arms, shoulders, hands, heads) all emphasises emotions. How you teach (your personality, ability, and the emotions you convey) affects what the students learn.
You may find it difficult to reduce your vocabulary, but to communicate effectively with young children you should use a maximum of 50 – 200 words. Try practising this by speaking on a subject for ten minutes, introducing yourself, talking about a game, parts of the body, the weather or your family, only using a maximum of 100 words. Other areas you may find uncomfortable are speaking slowly, repeating key phrases or making conversation at lunch and break times. These are all imperative areas you need to work at as they ensure understanding between tutor and pupil.
Italian children require enormous amounts of energy, enthusiasm and ideas to keep them entertained. The more material you have prepared, the easier it will be to keep their attention. Speak slowly, communicate at their pace, but keep the activities going. Things involving an element of competition will get children involved – team games, quizzes, bingo etc. Songs of any type, but especially pop songs, are also extremely useful and popular – they are a great way to get students to enjoy repetition without boring drilling.
PLEASE NOTE:
A copy of these grammar pages will be in the Tutor manual which you will receive at the beginning of the Orientation. Some of the grammar may look daunting at first.
Please do persevere,you have come this far!
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