Didactics

• A teacher is a person who controls, organizes, assesses, prompts, participates, and provides resources to students.
• The roles of a teacher include being a controller, organizer, assessor, prompter, participant, resource, tutor, and observer.
• A teacher can be a controller when announcements need to be made, order has to be restored, explanations are given, and the teacher is leading a question and answer session.
• A teacher can be an organizer by engaging, instructing, initiating, organizing feedback, and controlling the class.
• An assessor is a teacher who offers feedback, gives correction, and grades students in various ways.
• A prompter is a teacher who motivates their students, encouraging them to think independently.
• A participant is a teacher who joins the students in an activity not as a teacher but also as a participant.
• A resource is a teacher who acts as an information resource and helps the students when they ask them.
• A tutor is a teacher who gives personal instruction.
• An observer is a teacher who observes what students do so that they can give them useful group and individual information.
• A teacher can perform various roles energetically, encouragingly, clearly, fairly.
• A teacher can use mime and gesture, language model, and provide comprehensible input.
• Age is a major factor in deciding what to teach and how to teach it.
• Different ages have different needs, competences and cognitive skills.
• Children have facility in pronunciation.
• Teenagers are often more effective learners (age 12).
• Young children, adolescents and adult learners have different needs, competences and cognitive skills.
• Jean Piaget’s different stages in development are: Sensor-motor stage, Intuitive stage, Concrete operational stage, Formal operational stage.
• Every person has all of these intelligences, but one of them is more pronounced.
• According to NLP practitioners, we use a number of 'primary representational systems' to experience the world, described as VAKOG: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory.
• NLP is beneficial for retention of information.
• NLP suggests that a teacher can offer students activities which suit their primary preferred systems.
• Learning Style Questionnaires, for example, can help us to build a picture of the best kind of activity for the mix of individuals in a particular class.
• Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Multiple Intelligences Theory (MI Theory) are two models that categorize individual variations or modalities.
• Multiple Intelligences, a concept promoted by Harvard Psychologist Howard Gardner, suggests that we do not possess a single intelligence, but a range of intelligences such as musical/rhythmical, visual/spatial, verbal/linguistic, bodily, logical/mathematical, intrapersonal, and interpersonal.
• NLP is based on the belief that when people are engaged in activities, they are also making use of a representational system which can be visual, auditory, kinesthetic, or involve the other senses.
• If we accept the concept of Multiple Intelligences, we also have to accept the fact that the same learning task may not be appropriate for all of our students.
• NLP also suggests that teachers and students can see things from other people's points of view so they can be more effective communicators and understand each other better.
• The Concrete Operational Stage of Cognitive Development is characterized by the ability to follow rules, solve problems, and use logic.
• Ellis (1997) defines CPH as a period during which “target-language competence in L2 can only be achieved if learning commences before a certain age is reached.
• Leo Vygotski pointed out the so called ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) which is the gap between what a learner can already do and what they can potentially learn with support from a teacher.
• 9 and 10 year old children learn differently in the following ways: they respond to meaning even if they do not understand some words, often learn more indirectly than directly, their understanding comes in several ways: what they see and what they hear, find abstract concepts and grammar rules difficult, are curious, need for individual attention and approval from the teacher, keen to talk about themselves and respond well to learning about topics such as their home, have a limited attention span, can be bored if the activity is not interesting enough, are often seen as problematic students,
• The Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) as defined by Brown (2007) is a biological timetable during which, both first and second language is more successfully accomplished.
• The Formal Operational Stage of Cognitive Development is characterized by the ability to reason, think abstractly, and use logic.
• The onset of puberty is a critical period in the development of a child's body and brain.
• Benefits of Learning a Second Language at an Early Age include pronunciation and intonation, motivation, imitation, flexibility, curiosity, tolerance, learning and memory capacity.
• Age should not be a deterrent to learning a second language.
• Accent is the most prominent determiner of age of L2 acquisition.
• There is powerful evidence of a critical period for accent.
• Grammar, and its mastery, is possible in all languages and at all ages, but is more easily mastered during childhood.