Audio files for Soroka 3 and Soroka 4 = Sarafan 1 are now available for free on our YouTube channel. You can also find audio files for Soroka 1 and Soroka 2 there. To go to a specific section, use the links in the description.
Today we will talk about:
The age of the student affects not only the teaching of Russian as a foreign language; age affects teaching in general. People are different at 3 years old than they are at 60 years old. I also had an article about how to teach Russian as a foreign language to people over 50.
Continue reading “Teaching RFL to Children — What You Need to Pay Attention to”Any age. You can work with a newborn or an older child. I am currently teaching RFL lessons with a 2-year-old. Her name is Maria; she is American.
How are such RFL lessons different from lessons with a mother? The child is with the mother all the time, especially at this age. There is no communication plan and no tasks with the mother.
The teacher comes to communicate with the student for a short time. With the teacher, you need to concentrate on the material in a short lesson.
Continue reading “At what age can you start teaching RFL?”When our students are 7 to 9 years old, our task in the lesson is to introduce them to Russian graphics, to the Cyrillic alphabet. Our second task is to teach Russian spelling. I will tell you about the specific exercises that help us with this. This will be the first part of this article.
In the second part, I will show exercises for those who are starting to independently swim in written speech in Russian.
In the third part — i.e., at the end of the article, as I usually do — I will tell you a little about the theory. About what written speech is in general, not only for children.
Continue reading “Writing exercises in the RFL lesson with children ages 7 to 9”Let’s talk about this, but let’s narrow the topic. I will talk about the age range of 7 to 9 years old, and about working in a weekend school with a group of Russian as a Foreign Language, or bilingual, students.
For those who don’t know — a weekend school is a place where immigrants gather to teach their children Russian. This is not a state school with programs, requirements and final exams. Classes are usually held on Saturday and Sunday, hence the name.
Continue reading “A group where all the students are of different levels: How should you work in such an environment?”This is a very easy question; it is very easy to answer, because this topic has been developed for a very long time and everyone is very interested in it. Moreover, I will say that this is the topic that led me to study the methodology of teaching foreign languages.
We have three sections.
Continue reading “How can you teach children RFL (Russian as a foreign language) without explaining grammar to them?”All of the above are good. Each solves its own problems.
Video lessons. It is very good to watch them, especially at a young age. If you trust the channel, you can turn it on so that the child can watch and go do other things. Passive can easily become active, and that is how it should be. Language comes in through the ears. When there is a lot of language input in the environment, it is great. Video lessons are just language in the environment. Convenient for parents. Convenient for teachers to give homework: “Watch a video.” A very good option. A small note. If it is only watching a video, then this is passive perception. To turn passive into active, I would add some active forms of work: questions or discussions.
Continue reading “What is better, an app, video lessons or a textbook?”How do I feel about this? Absolutely positive.
For those teachers who know the methodology; the technology; in what order to give lexical topics, grammatical topics, phonetics — for those who know all these, they don’t even need a textbook.
I’ll show you how I can conduct an RFL (Russian as a foreign language) lesson without a textbook.
Continue reading “Teaching RFL without textbooks”First, a definition: Since many beginning teachers of RFL (Russian as a foreign language) read my blog, I will explain to them that all words of the language can be called by one word — vocabulary. Therefore, sometimes I will write “working with words,” and sometimes “working with vocabulary.” Beginners, get used to the terms, because they will come in handy.
We have two parts. In the first part, I will tell you about the procedure for working with vocabulary in practice.
In the second part, we will get acquainted a little with the theory of the methods of teaching RFL.
Today the topic of our conversation is the grammar of RFL (Russian as a foreign language). Today we have three sections:
1. Why does a native speaker need RFL grammar (and what surprised me personally)?
2. I will show how I teach RFL grammar to children 7 to 9 years old (of course, using my textbooks).
3. What do the classics say in the book “Learning to Teach” by A.A. Akishina and O.E. Kagan?
Continue reading “Grammar of RFL (Russian as a foreign language)”