Pamela: “My students find it exhausting and tedious to answer similar questions over and over again.”
Tina:
I just sense your frustration here. I know the feeling! You knock yourself out trying something new, you are stepping outside your comfort zone, and you are not getting the results, and you are second-guessing yourself. But I counsel you, stay the course and make some changes to provide more input and you will see the results. Traditional teaching, as you said, is just not effective. Input is the only way. And everyone can do it.
The kids are not going to be able to understand the fill-in-the-blank exercises if you put too much new language on them. I would start with the oral story, and cut out so much circling. In its place, I would counsel you to use the strategies that I sent you in an earlier email to provide repetitions without having to rely on circling. The fill-in-the-blank exercises could be used as an activity to end the story, after the kids have heard it several times in different contexts.
I do think that we all are able to learn a language – we already did so with our mother tongue. But maybe that’s just idealism and wishful thinking.
