As an English Education major student at School of Foreign Languages (SFL), Thai Nguyen University (TNU), i have been taught a lot of useful subjects related to my job as a teacher in the future. Of all those subjects, my most favorite one is “English teaching methods for primary students” taught by Mrs. Trang Tran – a lecturer at my school. In this semester, I have attended 3 first lessons of this subject. And the lesson that has made me inspired the most is the one called “Using the theory of Multiple Intelligences (MIs) to teach English for young learners in the classrooms”. This lesson was conducted on Friday, August 22nd, 2014 with the purpose of both introducing MIs to students like me and guiding us to apply using the theory of MIs to teach English for young learners in the classrooms.
To begin the lesson, Mrs. Trang Tran gave us a True-False test called “Multiple intelligences Test” (MIs Test). MIs is a theory developed by Howard Gardner in his 1983 book Frames of Mind. MIs theory includes some basic criteria for a behavior to be considered as intelligence, which are: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic, intra-personal, and inter-personal. This MIs quiz aims at helping us realize our real abilities in those 7 areas of intelligences so that we can develop our strong points and improve our weak points in building and designing activities for our primary students in the English classrooms.
Then, a collective activity was carried out for my classmates and me to attend. Mrs. Trang Tran acted as a primary teacher and we acted as primary students. She taught us to sing a song called “Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes”. She did not write the lyrics of this song on the board, but she taught us to pronounce those parts of body by asking us to repeat her actions when she was both singing and performing that song. All of us stood up, listened to her nice voice, imitated her actions to point at our head, our shoulders, our knees and our toes for several times. At that lovely moment, of course we felt as if we had been real children like we used to be several years ago.
Actually, Mrs. Trang Tran did not only sing that song and then stop the lesson. After teaching us to perform and learn the song by heart in that way, she asked us to analyze and point out MIs’ areas used in her activity. We were encouraged to raise our hands and our voice freely to express our perception. After all speeches were made, Mrs. Trang Tran noted down all of them on the board and summarized as well as implemented new contents and theories related to the lessons that we could not discover.
Finally, before finishing the class, Mrs. Trang Tran divided our class into small groups of 4-5 people. Each group was given 10 minutes to design an activity using MIs theory by their own and then the representative of each group was responsible for rehearsing their activity in front of the class so that all of us could take part in their activity.
The lesson lasted 4 periods and when the lesson finished, we felt so energetic and happy. The exciting teaching method designed by Mrs. Trang Tran attracted our attention and cooperation in an active manner. There seemed to be no distance between the teacher and students in that lesson. We were able to learn in an impressing environment of learning. In fact, through practical activities, we could easily adapt to the theory of “Using MIs in teaching English for young learners” in a more effective way. Until now, we have been ready to adapt that theory into practical teaching activities for primary students. To know more about the theory of Multiple Intelligences (MIs), please read at: http://theoriesincareertech.wikispaces.com/Theory+of+Multiple+Intelligence
By Thanh Huong
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