As ever, I was foraging through useful pieces of information the other night.
Most of my notes relate to learning about autism in the past 4+ years and it was the term ‘Incidental Teaching’ that caught my eye.
Incidental teaching doesn’t mean there’s no planning on the part of the person teaching. Plans are made but within the ongoing typical activities in a child’s day.
Now I know how I teach!
I particularly believe in using what used to be ‘every day activities’ as the foundation for ensuring that children learn to speak. It is also a very useful technique for teaching the basics of reading!
Unfortunately most young children no longer have ‘every day activities’ of the ordinary sort, just as they don’t have a mother to take care of them.
Their ‘every day activities’ include getting ready for the caregiver (inside or outside the home) or pre-school and once in that care (often at a tender age — 1 or 2 years old or younger, usually before they start talking!!) their routines involve no real world activities!! Neither are they taught by real teachers who are aware of what such young children need in order to learn.
Thus we have so many late talkers – at times I feel I am surrounded by ‘late talkers’!! I don’t pretend that I did better but I do know that I haven’t had a child of my own or in my care who didn’t readily communicate with me. Everyone can improve their speech patterns to ensure clarity but it does take a ‘teacher’ to remind them what to improve.
I spoke the other day with a man who came to this country at age 13 knowing no English. He’s now in his early 30’s. He has worked diligently to learn the language and to speak it with little accent. He is now a highly qualified exercise physiologist and teacher going on to do his Ph.D. But our discussion was about learning the English language in such a way that you could be clearly understood by those around you. He is virtually accent-less.
Even as a British English speaker I didn’t (and sometimes still don’t!) speak American English. I’m often not understood – we don’t speak the same language!!
This came to light recently when my neighbour, who is Scottish, and I both referred to the material being used to pave our road as ‘tarmac’. The word is from ‘Tar McAdam’ the term for asphalt in the UK. (The Scot John Loudon McAdam, a road engineer [1756–1836] devised the method for initially paving roads with a crushed gravel foundation – the tar came later, as did asphalt – oil-based from Trinidad).
Now my neighbour has been in the US for a good many years, probably 10 or more, and he’s a professional in his field but he didn’t know the material was called asphalt in the US. I’ve lived here for nearly 35 years and just couldn’t recall the right word.
Obviously the workers (immigrants themselves!) didn’t have a clue what we were referring to. It was one of those occasions when I designated my husband, the American, who also has some necessary Spanish (for the other immigrants!), to deal with the matter; it was satisfactorily resolved by our ‘intermediary’!
Now back to the point of this blog – ‘incidental teaching’. In the above situation the incidental teaching happened to me. It was a real world situation that required me to get the right word for a specific material. Yes I could go on calling it ‘tarmac’ but no one in America would know what I was talking about so what’s the purpose?
Likewise, if a child mispronounces a word and we don’t correct their pronunciation because it’s ‘cute’ when they’re little, we aren’t doing them any favours.
One little girl I cared for had listened and watched her favourite cartoon musical on CD and DVD, all with little supervision of a parent (it was a very cheap babysitter!). At age 4 she knew it all – wonderful, except that she’d now fixed it in her mind that she pronounced all the words correctly, just as she’d ‘heard’ the words. It was virtually impossible to correct her pronunciations; she wasn’t willing to learn the correct way.
Had someone been around her on a regular basis while she was watching and singing along her speech could have been corrected – but it would have taken someone to be her ‘incidental teacher’.
It is one of the major ways that children are slow talkers. They are learning most of their language from cartoon characters and the rest from listening by themselves (cheap babysitter!) to their favourite music.
Please watch a popular cartoon or three with the sound turned off and decide how you could learn to speak! Impossible! But that is what we are allowing to teach our children.
TURN OFF THE TV – yes I’m shouting!
Or try ‘incidental teaching’ as your most valuable tool.