The fastest way to make a class feel stupid is to say stuff to them that they can’t understand. Therefore I strenuously suggest that we be very careful before casually starting the year by asking our students in first year courses to be able to process what we think are very basic greetings, which in my view are much more neurologically challenging to our students than we have any idea.
The use of “How are you?”, with all the possible answers to that, can be heard by students as “Who are you?”. “How old are you?” complicates things further. The teacher who starts the year off with a bunch of those greetings runs the risk of losing the entire class before the year even gets off the ground.
I was coaching a teacher at iFLT a few weeks ago and he started off the class saying to me, “My name is _______.” I was mystified by that. When the very first thing I heard was something I couldn’t understand, my affective filter went straight up and my confidence tanked.
We can’t expect our students to process greetings too early. Just because greetings seem like an obvious place to start the year, and because they seem so basic to language, doesn’t mean that we should introduce any of those expressions as part of a list – they won’t be retained, especially the answers.
Personally, I don’t teach greetings formally. The conversations in class feel fake and are fake, and the kids pick up on that and tune the whole thing out. They tune it out because it is incomprehensible to them. It’s just another stupid thematic unit.
Learning a language should be effortless and interesting and fun, and it should instill in the student a desire to say something that they actually want to say. When teachers teach greetings just to teach them because it seems like the thing to do at the beginning of the year, their classes become neither effortless nor interesting for the students.
The teacher may ask, “Well, then where are they going to learn them?” The answer is, of course, in the middle of hundreds of hours of dialogue spawned from CI in the form of stories, songs, PQA, and the like. That’ll do it. Only in that case, the expressions will be retained, because they are part of a larger text, one that has meaning to the student.
Related: https://benslavic.com/blog/?s=teaching+greetings