How I teach the days of the week to beginning learners of German (for children and teenagers)10/6/2017
In order to teach the days of the week to beginning learners of German, I make use of the Youtube video ‘Wochentagelied’. But I do not only let my students listen to the song and then make them memorise the words. I apply what I know about language learning to guarantee the successful acquisition of the words. I start off by just playing the ‘Wochentagelied’ to the students and they have to listen and figure out what it could be about. This is part of my content driven approach to language teaching as the main focus in the beginning is to understand the general content of the song, the students do not focus on the days of the week yet. There are several words in the song that resemble words in the English language and so far the students have always worked out what the song is about. I continue the lesson by explaining the meaning of ‘der Wochentag’ = ‘day of the week’ before handing out the lyrics of the song and playing it again. I ask the students to read along while they pay attention to the pronunciation and intonation. After that I play it again and give them a chance to sing along and practice their pronunciation and intonation while doing that. I then give them an empty sheet of paper, they turn their worksheet with the lyrics over and they have one minute to write down the days of the week which they have just read and heard about. This is very difficult for the students and rarely does anyone manage to do that correctly. I do this exercise so that the students (actually it is their brain that does it for them) focus their attention on the days of the week and the spelling of the words when they listen to the song the next time. The brain does that because it experienced failure and noticed that it had a lack of information to complete the task and now it will try to make up for that at the second attempt by focusing on these words. Before I play it for a fourth time, I write the days of the week on the board so that I can briefly point out how the ‘ie’ in ‘Dienstag’ and the ‘ei’ in ‘Freitag’ is pronounced. The students then copy these words from the board onto another empty sheet to practice the writing of the words. After they have completed writing down the days of the week, they turn this sheet over as well so that they cannot access this information when they listen to the songs. Then I play the song for the last time and afterwards ask them again to write down the days of the week on an empty sheet of paper. At this point they generally get the spelling of most of the days right and manage to reproduce the correct order of the days of the week. As a homework task they have to memorise the words and write them down as a vocabulary item and practice them. Over the course of the next lesson(s) I make the students recycle the newly learned vocabulary by giving them different follow up tasks. One of these follow up tasks can be found on the second page of the worksheet. You can just have the students fill in the gaps from their memory or play the song again. There is no perfect way to do this and both options are fine depending what you want to focus on. The gap fill in activities are a good way of getting students to pay attention to the correct spelling of the words and give them practice in writing the words out. I have attached another worksheet with a variety of follow-up activities so the students can practice the days of the week while focusing on meaningful language. This is a very simple and basic topic but it exemplifies how I use the knowledge about language learning and apply it in practice to maximise students' success in learning the language. This approach to making a student learn the days of the week in German will be more successful than just having them memorise the words. The reasons for that is that the students have received meaningful input before they were even exposed to the actual lexical item (= word) that needed to be learned and because the days of the week were embedded in meaningful content as well. FOLLOW ME ON FACEBOOK: DNK TUITION
Birgit Tzitzifakis
10/24/2017 11:31:04
Vielen Dank für die Tipps...Ich lehre jetzt seit 6 Jahren in Griechenland und bin auf der ständigen Suche nach neuem, lebendigem Unterrichtsstoff...Meine Erfahrung ist, das Kinder besonders mit guten (!) Liedern sehr leicht zu motivieren sind. Es ist ein prima Einstieg, sich auf die fremde Sprache einzulassen. Tolles Lied mit dem ergänzenden Arbeitsblatt. Danke nochmals..
DNK TUITION
10/24/2017 17:28:53
Hallo Birgit, ich werde jetzt regelmäßig meine Stundenverlaufpläne und Arbeitsblätter, sowie Powerpointpräsentationen veröffentlichen, hauptsächlich für die 7., 10. und 12./13. Klasse. Außerdem werde ich ein paar Blog Posts zu Unterrichtstheorie und -methodik schreiben. Comments are closed.
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