Review: Comprehensive guide for foreign language teachers.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 3, 2014
Over the past 3 months, I've been trying hard to teach my 11 year old niece French, as it is very important for children to be fluent in more than one language. But it has often been a frustrating experience, both for my niece and myself, as she gets easily bored, and her attention span is quite short, and last few weeks, she's been inventing silly excuses to skip our class. This is the problem with many children when they are taught something new and difficult – they give up too easily.So, I've been looking for a book that not only explains the art of teaching a foreign language, but also goes into the psychology of teaching – especially to children. This book, “The Learning Code”, written as a collaborative effort by a foreign language teacher and an educational psychologist, met my requirements perfectly.This book has an ideal combination of teaching strategies, educational psychology, didactic and methodological knowledge, which is both comprehensive and effective. The writers use a teaching methodology called Total Physical Response – which is a brilliant way to speed up the learning of a foreign language, making use of sight, hearing and touch, or a multi-sensorial approach to learning.This method is best suited for teaching young students like my niece, who are still in their formative years, and makes sure that they do not get bored and frustrated too easily.While I'm yet to perfect the excellent methodologies explained in this book, my niece enjoyed the last class where I took a different approach to teaching, using some of the knowledge gained from this book. So, I would venture to suggest the approach actually works.