Learning styles and classroom activities

It's important to provide practice in all the four language skills - listening, speaking, reading and writing - so that different types of learners are catered for.

Do remember, however, that you will do almost no writing with seven- and eight-year-olds, and a limited amount of reading - the reading you will do will probably be at a word or basic sentence level, nothing too complex. The older your young learners are, the more reading and writing you will introduce. Only expect children to do in English what they can do in their own language.

Furthermore, if you do a lot of silent reading and writing in class and little listening and oral work, you are favouring visual learners over auditory learners. It's vital to include a good balance of the skills.

Look at the lists below. Taking the skill of writing as an example, they show a variety of writing activities that cater to visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learners.

Visual	Auditory	Kinaesthetic
· Ordering pictures into stories · Writing messages on postcards · Blank comic strips · Creating comic strips · Written visualisation	· Dictations - listen and fill in the gaps · Learner dictation – learners dictate to each other · Writing dialogues · Writing sketches · Writing role-plays	· One child gestures, others guess what s/he means and writes it down · Writing a class newspaper · Writing/acting short dramas · Writing and answering problem pages · Written peer feedback

Because we don't do very much writing with younger young learners, most of the above activities are appropriate for the pre-teen and teenager age groups that you looked at in the First steps unit.

Now, using the list of written activities above as your example, choose one of the other three language skills – speaking, listening or reading - and write down suitable activities for visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learners.

Check your ideas in the next section.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 906