English How do you teach language to illiterate users?

H.C. Heartland

H.C. Heartland

Legacy Member
My husband and I have been doing volunteer work in a 3rd world country where we must teach sign language to a lot of different language level users. Some have never been exposed to the sign language of the country, others have a limited vocabulary. We use a lot of pictures when we teach and hands on activities. What are some of your favorite methods for teaching language?
 
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/27/us/new-approach-used-to-teach-illiterate-adults.html

According to this article, the best way is to provide group sessions for teaching language to illiterate adults. For the most part, illiterate individuals don't have a problem learning how to read or recognise words. It's comprehending whole sentences, phrases and paragraphs that confuse them. And using this approach, they learn that they aren't alone in this issue. They also learn how to create such phrases, sentences, etc. until they are able to comprehend them.
 
The best method to teach English to illiterate learners is to first of all teach the parts of speech. Demonstrations of these can be compared to their mother tongues. The second step is to construct simple sentences involving everyday activities like greetings. From there, teaching on flow and diction should be easy.
 
It helps if you can hire a tutor or someone who's really fluent in the language to teach you how to speak it. But speaking a language isn't the be all or end all, you have to be able to read and write it as well otherwise you'll be, funnily enough, illiterate. So you'll have to get them to teach you how to read and write as well, which can end up costing a lot. If money is a problem, then there are lots of online courses and ebooks to help you out
 
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