We started a new approach to teaching English to teachers today. The approach may sound a bit basic, but when one puts the shoe on the other foot, maybe it is not. If you didn´t know any Spanish, would reading first grade literature books in Spanish be too simple? Probably not for most people. All we need to get past is the idea that adults are reading first grade material. Wednesday is our first experiment with this approach.
We brought back a wooden clock with moveable hands which would be used in first grade. This was a big hit last week in the teacher class as we worked on how to tell time in English.
I have started typing the story content of the first grade books in double spacing so that the reader can write the translation on their own copy of the story since writing in the book is not possible. We may even try this approach in some of the classes for students.
This approach will rely heavily on the use of pictures in the stories to build vocabulary. This is what pictures do for primary students in their own language.
By the time we are finished with this experiment here, we should finally know what we should have known at the beginning.
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How the human mind learns language has been a mystery to me and still is. Children pick it up by being immersed in it from their first days. In my case I was immersed in Czech until about age 4 when my folks realized that in a year I would enter a school and needed English so I became immersed in English. (Never learned either one very well) I have been tutoring a lady for several years in Czech as she needed the language to visit and write to her husbands relatives in the Czech lands and to do geneology. In the process I learned to read and write the language (1st grade level) myself. We meet for 2 hours perhaps 20 times a year. Progress is slow.
I think you are on the right track.
Don
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