Susan and group members: I have been teaching ESL to beginning adults for about 30 years and I have always used a bilingual method in my classes. The results have been very favorable, culminating in the creation of a website and program that has proven to be useful for Spanish speaking adult English learners (1).
I believe that adopting bilingual methods – or providing L1 support – would be very beneficial to any adult ESL program. Offering bilingual support would serve as a Transition to an English Only class, and, I believe, it would lead to a better retention rate. And, obviously, I am convinced that students would learn better and become more enthusiastic about learning English.
But, whenever I have presented my position here in LINCS over the years, I have been met with a variety of skeptics who have answered me with a laundry list of reasons why the bilingual method is not suitable in their classrooms. Often people agree that a bilingual method is better than English Only, but that it is impractical.
To illustrate, one of the more frequent criticisms of the bilingual method is the argument that it is imposible to implement in a multi-lingual class. To answer this criticism, I present an outline of how I would teach a multi-lingual class of beginning adults:
In a class of 25 or more students who speak five languages or so I would use copies of a Picture Dictionary, appropriate bilingual dictionaries, lined notebooks, Flashcards, CDs and 10 computers. The class would meet twice a week for 2 hours.
My Main Rule is that nobody can make fun of another student in class, but they can laugh at me and my jokes.
Students would be grouped according to their languages, and then we would begin the first class….with the alphabet.
I would stand in front of the class and with humor and exaggertion show them how to pronounce all the letters, focusing on the difficult letters, such as: G/J, L vs R, V, W, etc. I would also show them that they needed to write the phonetic spelling of the letter in their languages.
For example, Spanish – Aa Ei
At this point I would introduce the question: How do you spell…your name? Each student would be given an opportunity to practice spelling her or his name while looking at the phonetic spelling of each letter.
Then I would show them how to make Flash Cards of the Alphabet so that they can practice with each other.
I would then show the students how to use the computer and their smart phones in order to study English bilingually.
Perhaps I would finish the class with my rendition of the ABC song, which always gets a big laugh.
All students would then be told that they can take the Picture Dictionary, the bilingual dictionary and the CDs home with them…for home work!!
For the first two months or so, I would teach the numbers up to one million, greetings and salutations, food and shopping, etc., etc. – a basic vocabulary of about 500 common words.
Each lesson would include various dialogues to practice out loud in class.
I teach most lessons in stages, which include an introduction with pronunciation, practice, a quiz, repetion, reminders and so on up until the students have learned the lesson well.
Often it takes a lot of repetion for the students to learn something, so I advocate and practice a lot of patience, observation and humor.
As part of building up a good vocabulary, I provide Graded Readers which I have written and which the students read out loud in class, taking turns.
In this way the students not only acquire a vocabulary of the most common words, but they also learn phrases and methods of learning English on their own.
Usually by the third month I introduce gramar, especially verb tenses.
The above is a summary of how I probably would approach a Multi-Lingual class using a Bilingal Method.
I look forward to your responses.
References:
1. Pumarosa.com and inglesconprofepablo.com
For further Reading:
2./bilingualteachingmethods.blogspot.com/
3. /purwarnolinguistics.blogspot.com/2006/01/bilingual-method_19.html
4.https://www.fluentu.com/blog/educator-english/bilingual-method-of-teaching-english/