Talking in class

The intention of this article is that you understand that there are different registers and that you can learn them. This is important for us, teachers. We can teach our pupils the registers they need in their later career. It’s an art to master the language.

Language is an instrument.
The main idea of language is shaping and reshaping ideas, to understand and to give interpretations to it. We, as teachers, need to stimulate this. We need to create a space for the pupils to shape their ideas, to reshape their ideas, to understand each other and perhaps to give interpretations to some things. Reading is not the same as talking. So it is important that the pupils talks in the class to shape ideas.

When you look at it, every teacher is a language teacher. Every teacher needs to give attention to language.

90% of the teaching is implicit, 10% is explicit. So 90% of our own knowledge is implicit learning. As teachers we need to pay attention to it.

To construct hypotheses, you need to master your language. Understanding is very important is this situation. You need to understand the context in the own language and then translate it. You need to speak properly.

For example, it’s better that you, as a teacher, motivates the pupils to speak Dutch in the class, but that it is possible to talk their mother language at home (if the mother language is not the same as Dutch). This for the following reason. If your parents don’t talk Dutch as their mother language, it’s possible that they make a lot of mistakes in Dutch. Then it’s better to talk your mother language, because otherwise you will learn mistakes. It’s hard to forget mistakes and learn the correct Dutch. So as a teacher, if you know your pupils have another mother language, do not motivate them to talk Dutch with their parents if they don’t master the language.