Rational step-by-step scaffolding that actually works.
Allow students to build their speaking skills at the difficulty level they need.
Make learning a certainty.
Language learners need speaking practice at the right level for their current abilities.
Too easy or predictable and they’ll get bored.
Too difficult and they’ll get overwhelmed and give up.
English learners need to systematically progress through 4 levels of speaking ability.
They cannot skip levels 2 - 4.
How does this practice-driven approach work with real students?
Annie is an 8 year old student that I recently began teaching.
She’d already received in English classes in school for years, but couldn’t even answer the question “How are you?” or form even basic sentences.
Her vocabulary was limited to colors and a few other words.
She had zero listening comprehension and couldn’t understand anything anyone said to her in English.
She had no interest in studying English.
Practice-driven learning changed everything for Annie.
First, I taught her 17 animals and got her talking with a simple, but fun Deduction Challenge that used 2 basic sentence patterns.
Then I introduced various food ingredients / food categories and used them with a slightly more advanced task with 6 sentence patterns.
Finally, after learning a few shapes, Annie was ready to succeed at this more advance speaking task using over a dozen sentence patterns.
This whole process took only twelve lessons.
As the video shows, during her 12th practice-driven English lesson, Annie is already tentatively forming meaningful sentences using nouns, verbs, adjectives & numbers.
Not only is her English already better than my French (despite my 6-years of classes), but her English has also made progress faster than my Chinese — even when I could the opportunity to practice every day with Chinese native speakers in Beijing.
When students are able to practice speaking English with tasks that have the right level of difficulty and involve having fun solving interesting challenges, their speaking skills quickly improve.
“While residing in rural Asia, I used Playguistics® to help my daughters learn English – and it really worked! It’s fun, clever, and makes learning a new language feel very natural.”
-Dr. Roel Bolt from The Netherlands
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