AIM

Here is what I wrote as part of an assignment about an alternative French Teaching Program that interested me to the point that I plan to go and work as a volunteer in the only such class in Windsor, Ontario, Canada for a month.

The Accelerative Integrated Method (AIM) is a method of teaching French as a second language that exceeds the curriculum expectations of this subject in public schools. The main idea of AIM is to reinforce learning of the language through visual support (the use of gestures), story-based lessons, inductive grammar, creative writing, scaffold reading, music, drama and dance. It ingrains in the students the seven hundred essential words they need to function in the language. Some of the gestures are based on American Sign Language (ASL). The teaching of the grammar is inductive and is based on using complete sentences. It begins simple, using only the singular pronouns and is mostly verb-based.

The visualization of words through gestures instils them in the children’s mind by forming mental images. The big picture books with their scaffolded exercise books are followed by drama-based activities. The incidental learning of the grammar happens when the teacher encourages the class to model a complete sentence for a student who has just failed to relay a certain point in French. The whole class creative writing is scaffolded by the teacher’s guidance. It not only stimulates the student’s creative thinking but also encourages them to probe their inventory of words and reuse them in a new content and therefore increase their learning of both words and grammar. There is lots of dancing and music involved. The music mostly supports the grammar taught and sometimes is used as a motivational tool. The assessment is done through marking the exercise books and the follow-up activities like story writing or reading comprehension exercises. There are no tests in this method. The fact that the miming is in itself another sign language might be a factor in the students’ successful learning experience. They are actually learning two languages with the same grammar-base at the same time. So one could reinforce another and vice versa. I have also noticed that only the major words are emphasized on through specific gesticulations. This is important in the process of leaning when it only supports the production of language without making students totally dependant on the gestures.

In general the AIM activities all complete each other’s educational outcome by integrating the four areas of language learning: reading, writing, listening and speaking and even exceeding them. To fulfill its promise, the AIM program adopts a variety of supplementary materials from overhead projector to Smart Board, Microsoft word processor, educational CDs and DVDs, big books and more.

The AIM classes are lively, active and motivational. Almost all students are involved in the process of learning. There are less behavioural problems in these classes and students generally enjoy learning French.

My language experience-Entry One

I remember my first serious classes in English as an adult. They had put me in the very beginners class despite my moderate knowledge of the language since I was a language student at university too. So the information taught was too easy for me. But I remember I was so motivated to learn more and do it as soon as possible that from the very first classes I began to make everything relevant to my learning and looked for words that I did not know in English from the corner pictures of the book or the foot prints to the furniture of the class and the words the teacher used or the gestures she made, I tried to find their equivalents in English. Later on I started taking notes from the teacher's instructions and felt great joy whenever I could land a new word from her speech. When others contented themselves with what the book or the teacher taught, I strove to find the meanings of the words in an English-English dictionary where from my own volition decided to learn the new terms I came across in the definition of the new concepts as well. I had made it a habit to learn the recent expressions in full sentences by either improvising or copying their usage examples from the dictionary or the text itself. I had pinned half page squared papers in between the pages of my book on which I kept endless records of added locutions with their meanings and citations and the new designations found in the definitions of the current words themselves. Some times I would use up pages before I am done with a single fresh utterance! Through the book I have used many such papers for anecdotal simple back and forth dialogues between my teacher and myself or one of the students using an original word order that sounded interesting to me and which I intended to learn and use. In my more advance classes where the teacher deliberately started the class with small talk and where most of other students were shy or not prepared to talk or would not think of anything to say, I would have prepared and memorized jokes and anecdotes from my favorite hard-to-reach magazine (because foreign magazines were scarce back then in Iran and I believe they still are) : "Reader's Digest". I did not care if they are amusing or if anybody laughs at the punch lines which for the most part were not what as Iranians we were used to since it came from a totally different culture. In that class, I recall I had a very fastidious rival who would start the class by her nugatory scuttlebutt to which only the male teacher would listen with pretentious interest that was in fact directed towards her charms as a very young, made up and flirtatious girl. I particularly remember this episode of my class when after a couple of such insipid class starter yarns the teacher very bluntly asked me and surprisingly not her, a favour not to tell any more of these chestnuts for which I got a bit disappointed. Instead of losing hope, I started to think of other stories like what had happened to me during my absence from the class and most importantly I would prepare for it so I could ask questions about the tidings for which I had not found a correspondent in English. To this day I regret why I did not report his discriminatory behavior to the manager of the institute. In spite of all the adversaries from the lack of adequate number of English magazines to such unfair teachers and institute managers who only thought of their own profits when they put me in a beginner class despite my adequate knowledge to start off a bit further on the scale; I am proud of my perseverance and creativity and ingenuity in coming up with ways to increase my vocabulary and my flexibility in using different structures of the language. I want to possibly surprise the readers of this blog by asserting that I have written this piece by constantly consulting the online thesaurus and google searching for additional expressions of the terms I already knew to avoid repetition and to still learn dewy words and phrases. I am proud of this too! This self-regulated, lifelong learning of the languages!

This piece was the first in my recent series of self-given assignments which I like to continue through the guidance I get from the end of each chapter of : "Principles of learning and teaching."