TEACHING, LEARNING AND IMPROVING LANGUAGE SKILLS

By Elaine-Kirn Rubin and Arthur Rubin

Are you a professional educator – teacher, administrator, or program coordinator? Or are you just someone who wants to help others – your children, parents, or relatives – with their language skills? Or do you want to improve your own proficiency?

Whichever it is, you should know that there are many ways, ranging from the formally structured to the casually intuitive, to teach, learn, or improve language competence. And they are endlessly adaptable to individual circumstances.  

• Enroll in a language or teacher-training course or program. Such opportunities are available at a public or private school, or community site with a physical location.  Try hard to be regular in your attendance, participate fully—including getting your questions answered and requesting whatever you need.  Complete ALL assigned tasks and homework, study the available materials and strive to make the most effective use of the related resources, both hard copy and online.  REMAIN COMMITTED UNTIL THE END OF THE COURSE OF STUDY.
• Purchase or borrow standard textbooks or perhaps experimental materials – preferably accompanied with audio, visual, video and/or online ancillaries. Use them as instructed, step by step; make note of how the suggested procedures work for you and others.
•  Alternatively, devise your own methods or techniques for presentation, comprehension checks, logistics, individual and interactive practice, communicative expression and assessment of progress or mastery.  Be sure to cover the essentials, either at optimal speed for everyone involved, or at a customized pace for each person or group, depending on the circumstances. Draw on other aspects of the curriculum and materials to keep everyone engaged, motivated and moving forward. Value face-to-face learning; resist wasting time on petty procedural matters. Pay careful scrutiny to how each experiment serves educators and students alike, then make the necessary tweaks.
• Make effective use of the endless variety of free or low-cost language curricula and materials available on the Internet. Among them: informational articles and “how-to” advice; comprehensive, sequenced courses at specified levels of difficulty; self-contained skills lessons; visual worksheets to print out, copy, and distribute; audio segments accompanied by pictures/text; streaming video episodes with story lines; hands-on, multi-media or interactive activities; instructional aids such as vocabulary lists or talking glossaries; puzzles to solve and games to play; and reference lists of language items to teach or learn.  These may be samples/demos of commercial programs, archived collections from public-domain or government sites, originally televised public broadcasting serials, freebie language-learning content and tools; and so on.  Try out some suggested links, too.

We have more to say on this topic but have run out of space. To learn more, please read our next blog.