Screen Learning
A few days ago I noticed my six-year-old eating noodles in a funny way. He was pulling them up with his teeth while trying to look fierce. ‘I’m a little dinosaur,’ he said. He was play-acting a scene from a recent TV programme, so I quizzed him about what he remembered about dinosaurs. The answer was, not a lot. There is a modish rush to embrace internet and computer learning, but is learning via a screen a good method? One writer tells how he tried out an interactive programme with his son. The father diligently read the words while the son fiddled with the pictures. ‘Had he spent ten minutes in front of a book, he might possibly have learned something,’ said his father.
Television, as my son and his noodles demonstrate, is an impressionistic, suggestive medium. Research about television and learning shows that learning goes on in a learning environment where dialogue is taking place with teachers or parents. It needs to be mediated. There is nothing wrong with harnessing new technology to teach our children, but there is still a big role for formal education. Teaching Dialogues
Steps:
1. Set the scene - Stick figures. - Flannel board figures - A nice picture showing the situation - Puppets 2. Teacher reads the dialogue at normal speed once or twice and indicates the speaker. Students’ books are closed. 3. The teacher reads the dialogue again sentence by sentence. The students are put into groups. Each group repeats the part of speaker after the teacher. The groups can exchange their parts. Long sentences are broken into meaningful parts. Group choral repetition after the teacher. 4. Students open their books. Groups or individual students read the part for one speaker. Pronunciation errors can be corrected. 5. Teacher asks questions on the dialogue. 6. Dialogue Reconstruction. The teacher puts key words on the blackboard. These words should normally be content words not structure words. The teacher gets the students with books closedto reconstruct the dialogue from these key words. Mimes, pictures can also be used instead of or in addition to the key words. 7. Dialogue continuation. a. Get the students to continue the dialogue. b. Get the students working in groups yo compose other dialogues depending on the situation in the dialogue.
