What a fun class!

I was taught little Indonesian, Korean, Italian, French and one dialect in Africa in today’s TOEFL course. Our professor asked us to present a three minute lesson on our own native language to shed lights on some concepts about how to teach a foreign language properly.

To sum up, there are several key elements in preparing the lessons:

1. Contextualize learning materials with the students’ prior experiences.
2. Do not give too much information during a short period of time.
3. Illustrate new materials by contrasting to what the students have learned.
4. Encourage the students to ask questions among one another.
5. In the field of learning language, repetitions are absolutely essential.

Interestingly, I believe that these tricks mentioned above might be applied to different areas of academic teaching as well.