B.Ed DAYS

eacher and blogger Larissa Albano, who won our latest monthly Teaching English blog award, explains how using pictures as a teaching aid can help language teachers engage their students. If I say 'picture', what do you think about? I guess the words 'drawing', 'photo', 'painting', and 'film' might come to mind. As for me, well, I think a picture is much more than an image, especially when I teach English. Pictures are essential when it comes to engaging students who are learning a new language at any level. They can be successful study aids during lessons, and they can act as useful prompts to help students when they are practising speaking. So how can you use pictures in the classroom? Here are seven tips for bringing visual aids into your lessons, each starting with one of the letters in 'picture' to help you remember them. P redict: Students can look at pictures or watch the first part of a video in order to predict what th...

Language Acquisition Device Anybody who has had or known a child knows that children take to learning language at a remarkable rate. In fact, it seemed a little too remarkable for one linguistics researcher. Noam Chomsky, a pioneering linguist and a professor at MIT, put forth an idea called the language acquisition device or LAD, for short. The LAD is a hypothetical tool hardwired into the brain that helps children rapidly learn and understand language. Chomsky used it to explain just how amazingly children are able to acquire language abilities as well as accounting for the innate understanding of grammar and syntax all children possess. Keep in mind that the LAD is a theoretical concept. There isn't a section of the brain with 'language acquisition device' printed on it and a big switch to turn on and learn a new language. Rather, the LAD is used to explain what are most likely hundreds or thousands of underlying processes that humans have in their brains tha...