My Language Teaching Methods, My BA Teaching Degree, and My Experience as a Foreign Language Teacher

My foreign language lessons begin with immeidatley listening to the language and focusing only on what you can understand at your stage - even if it is merely the strange sounds or pronunciation of a letter or a strange sound. You listen to a small segment as often as you want to pick up even more the second or third time around. Constant listening allows you to frequently hear words that are very similar to the words in your own language to excelerate your knowledge of the foreign language - even the similar words with different meanings. You begin repeating what you hear with the new sounds of the foreign language, not yours. Yo then develope the four skills of learning a language: first listening and speaking, and then understanding the meaning of words, phrases, and thoughts. You learn to operate in the foreign language with hints as to why it is spoken as it is. You increase the vocabulary and subject matter of the listening segments. At this stage, it is alright to "intelliently guess" the meaning of what you hear because you develop the continued concentration to follow the meaning as you listen to a conversation. I have never seen a baby check the dictlonary. You can always learn to verify the meaning of an unknown segment by asking the speaker, if you understood correctly, as part of the conversation. You don't have to look everything up in the dictionary. After feeling comfortable with operating in the language by listening and speaking by repetition, you see spelling and read to fortify your confidence and assist in the operation of the language in different subject matter areas. With certain comfortable listening and speaking skills, the student increases vocabulary in the area that they are interested in with constant listening exercises to make sure that he or she understands the language in its normal speed. The student eventually develops the ability to use their known knowledge of the language within the context of the spoken language to "intellectually guess" and determine what the unknown protions of the conversation are. When there is a reading exercise, I encourage the student to review the glossery first so that they develop a passive vocabulary, before reading, thus they do not have to look up every word they are not familiar with as they read, so that the reading exercise goes much more fluently and rapidly-