Tips for Teaching a Foreign Language

Video Transcript

" Hello my name is Hakeem Lavelle I am here on behalf of Expert Village to do a how to video on teaching a foreign language. Now we are on my favorite portion: success cases. Do you know what it feels like to walk into something that you thought was impossible or something that you thought was challenging and to actually learn something. Learning. It feels good to learn it and it feels really good teach. It is very gratifying to see somebody do something that they couldn't do before. It is evening more gratifying when you are in the process of doing it. When you are teaching somebody something and they don't even realize they are learning and by the time you turn around and you are at the end of the cycle, not only that person learn something but it is not until you get away from that person sometimes that you see the progress that they have made. Most of the time you find that they have exceeded your wildest expectation. Then there is a flip side. Then there are times when you think that someone has not learned anything and it may take there mind a minute to adapt. But in both cases most of the time you can't really tell the progress that you have made until...while it takes time. Sometimes you may have thought someone something and they can't recall it instantly there and you turn around and next time you know bing just like that. They learn something and they are telling you something that they learn. I will give you scenario I was teaching a child one time. This child I believe had a attention deficit disorder and I was actually teaching him Arabic and I was talking in the car one day to his brothers and sisters and I was teaching them a word and I forgot the word. The child came and told me the word. He said and the word was an Arabic word, sollem, means ladder. While I was teaching his brothers and sisters I was going through vocabulary and got up to sollem and I told his brothers and sisters sollem and I got stuck just like uhh...and I heard a voice come out and said "brother Hakeem sollem means ladder." I looked and it was my student that I thought was not paying attention and I said who taught you that. He told me you taught it to me. I was absolutely in shock. This is an example of a student who you don't think you taught something and he was registering the information because you said it over and over and over again. He hadn't been processing when you wanted him to process it but it processed. Then you have another student of mine who I taught him and I now I taught him well but I didn't know how well until a year later when I stopped teaching him and he went to another teacher and the other teacher kept complementing me on how well he did. When I actually sat back and I evaluated him I saw that I taught him a whole lot. Thank you!"