Sara Holtkamp
Sara Holtkamp
Sara Holtkamp TEFL certificate
PROFILE
PROJECTS
My teaching approach
Part 1.
How to acquire a langage
The mother tongue
When I asked my mum how she taught me German she said she read stories to me and my older brother. My dads favorite sentence is: „I always talked to you while changing diapers.“. One way or another every infant gets to hear language. Someone (usually the parents) “present”, what the language is meant to look like.
With approximately 4 moths babies become able to differ linguistic and non linguistic sounds. This means I was able to make out the difference between my mum telling me about the big wide world and my dog barking. With about 8-12 months a babies focus lies on rhythm and language structure.
Babies start making sounds that eventually turn into words.
If my dad would say: Good night, I would eventually repeat something that sounded fairly similar. By repeating what the parents say, babies get to practice the language.
What is the most important thing to look at when thinking back about we've acquired our mother tongue, is that we used meaning as a clue to language. Not language as a clue to meaning.
So when dad would switch of the light at night and say good night. I learned that when the light turned off (meaning) I had to say good night (language).
At the beginning of language learning I mainly repeated what my parents had said but at some stage I was the one to say good night before my dad would do so. This is when I'd understood, and started to independently produce language.
The fist second language
The first English words I learned were „crocodile“ and „hippopotamus“. You might ask yourself why I didn't start with „hello“, „my name is“ and „thank you“, as everyone else in this world. This is due to the fact that I was about 5 years old when I was first introduced to the English language. The teaching methodology my kindergarten English teacher used is called Total physical Response and based on coordination of language and physical movement. When she said the word crocodile all of us would pretend to be a crocodile, by readjusting a big mouth with our arms. When she said the word „hippopotamus“, all of us would pretend to be a hippopotamus.
Movement activates the right side of the human brain, whereas acquiring words happens in the left side of the brain. By combing both, it's more likely to remember. Besides, 5 year old me liked pretending to be a crocodile way better than saying „thanks“.
In secondary school, a new teaching methodology called Grammar Translation Method (GTM), should become my new best friend. Or greatest enemy?
„Yesterday, ago and last this is simple past“, I learned wherever a sentence included yesterday, I had to use the structure past simple, whenever there was a for or since, it had to be present perfect. This worked for passing my exams. There would always be a signal word which told me, which time to use. Applying those rules in a real conversation should be more difficult. I had to think about all the words to use in my sentence first to analyze if one of them would be a signal word to tell me which time to use. Just that not every sentence contained a signal word.
GTM teaches grammar rules and has a focus on reading and writing tasks.
To be fair GTM is the easiest and most common teaching method for schools, it is hard to have speaking activities in a class of thirty.
Especially outside of school I started getting familiar with a third teaching method. My personal favorite. The communicational approach. As the name allows to suppose, the communicational approach focuses on learning through communication. Involving authentic learning situations.
By living and working in New Zealand. communicating in English helped me to start thinking in English and thinking in English helped me dreaming in English. This was when I had finally acquired the language.
The second, second language
Equally as for 1st language acquisition there are several theories on how we acquire a second language.
According to, the input hypothesis, a learner progresses only when he or she is exposed to comprehensible input that is slightly beyond his or her linguistic competence.
Starting a journey though Latin America, I was surrounded by input beyond my linguistic competence. I started working at different places with people from Chile, Mexico, Venezuela and living with people from Columbia, Ecuador and Costa Rica. This got me quite a variation of Spanish input. Starting off I couldn't participate in Spanish conversations but I would try understanding them and sometimes ask to them to translate. What you've heard one time you might forget, what you've heard 3 times you might forget, but what you've heard 20 times you might remember. That was how it worked.
The main intention of acquiring a language is communication though and this is where the acquisition-learning hypothesis comes into play. It states that we learn best through natural communication. My first real Spanish conversation took place with an 8 year old in Costa Rica.
When learning a language, fear of exposure makes it hard to start talking, whenever it's possible to communicate in the own language most of us would prefer that. So what needs to be done is erasing both, the possibility to talk the own language and the fear of exposure.
In my situation the little guy's mum had left me in charge of him and nothing would have been less polite. than not saying anything. As he didn't speak English I was forced to communicate in Spanish. And as he was only a child I didn't fear exposure.
From that point onwards it became easier to talk. My focus wasn't on grammatical structures which might have made me sound a little weird sometimes, but allowed me to communicate.
Part 2.
My perfect English lesson
Why do we acquire our first language better than a second one? And why did I learn more Spanish within 5 months of traveling South America, as I'd learned English in 5 years of school? The answer is not that Spanish is the easier language, in fact I believe it's more difficult.
Thinking back, the two hypotheses, mentioned above, played part in acquiring all three languages, English, Spanish and German. First of all it was being surrounded by the target language (the input hypothesis), learning English through watching English movies, reading English books and later through living in New Zealand. With Spanish it was traveling Latin America and being surrounded by Spanish speaking people. And last but not least, with German, listening to Mum and Dad.
The second hypothesis, communicating in the target language, the acquisition-learning hypothesis. English and Spanish: working, and making friends in New Zealand and Latin America, German: communicating with my family.
Let's imagine I'd want to teach students, with the same needs as myself the structure: „past simple“ the lesson could look as followed:
Starting with Quick questions I will start a conversation, and surround students with the TL.
The next step will be the activity. Knowing my student, I will know about his/her fields of interests and I'll base the topic on something the student is familiar with. In my case, I've been traveling. Accordingly our activity will face the topic traveling.
Thinking back about how a child acquires a language, it's been said that primarily someone has to present the language. So this exactly what I'm going to do with my student.
„ You traveled Latin America.“
„You had a good time.“
Are sentences that present the past simple structure. To make things more interesting and real those sentences would have to be part of a story, role play, game or similar to create a virtual reality.
After presenting the structure it needs to be practiced, thinking back about how a child acquires a language, this is how it worked.
At the last stage should we should get the students to talk freely. Just as the baby who learned to produce language. This could be done by storytelling about what has happened, during travels in the past or an argument that faces something regarding traveling that has happened in the past.
Using a topic the student is familiar with, in my case traveling, will help expressing an opinion. This is called Constructivism and another theory about how we acquire language.
Finishing the activity with concept checking questions, I've mainly worked with a communicative approach and put my student in a situation they could face in real life. As seen in my personal description of language acquisition, those have been the approaches that worked best for me personally.
Other students might learn best through movement, in this case we would have to work with Total Physical Response or some might be interested in linguistics, in this case working according the Grammar Translation method should be part of class. Also not everyone is interested in traveling. Having a student, who is interested in football we should make the activity about football.
How to create the perfect English lesson has to be influenced by the students to teach.
