Our students had a great chance to study some foreign language teaching methods under the programme “Deutsch mit Hans Hase” that is carried out jointly with Goethe Institute in Minsk and the Department of World Literature and Foreign Languages. The programme introduces future teachers of the German Language to various language teaching methods such as TPR, theater pedagogy, CLIL and narrative approaches.
What is it?
“Deutsch mit Hans Hase” (German with Bunny Hans) is a teaching method that introduces children to the basics of German through playing, developed specifically for pre-schoolers, taking into account their psychological and physiological characteristics. This technique has been approved in Western European, Belarusian and Russian kindergartens and schools.
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TPR (Total Physical Response) is a language teaching method based on the coordination of language and physical movement. In TPR, instructors give commands to children in the target language with body movements, and children respond with whole-body actions. New foreign words are remembered with the help of gestures and movements, which activates the motor, emotional, conceptual and verbal memory.
- Theater techniques increase children’s interest and help to speak a foreign language. A lesson is based on the current method “Deutsch mit Hans Hase” (Bunny Hans) that comes to children to teach them German. Hans Hase is a sock puppet speaking German only. The only way to play with Hans Hase is to learn to speak with him.
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CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is an approach for learning content through a foreign language, thus it combines foreign language learning and school subjects learning e.g. mathematics, physics, geography and etc.
- Narrative Approach introduces literary texts already in the very beginning of a foreign language learning and leads to a good understanding of a language. A teacher reads aloud with gestures, intonation and movements.
Reasons to participate in the programme:
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Increasing instructional knowledge. Thanks to the project, students master the special knowledge that helps to work with children. The method can also be used in everyday school practice with children and adult people as well.
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A chance to find a good job. On finishing the course the students get an international standard certificate that is the key to work in kindergartens and primary schools.
- Improvement of one’s language skills. Future teachers learn language teaching techniques in a foreign language and teach children without translation. Children easily accept German as a language of communication and are not afraid of it.
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Acquisition of practical skills. At the beginning of winter holidays, the students specializing in Romance and Germanic Philology gathered together to participate in the seminar “Early Foreign Language Learning with Bunny Hans”, supervised by project assistant Marina Mitkina. The participants presented their own lesson plans, practiced skills in working with children's fiction and tested new songs and games.
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Acquaintance with students from other universities of Belarus. This year students from Mogilev State University named after Kuleshov took part in the seminar as well. The students of the two universities gathered in Minsk to reinforce the knowledge they acquired on the 1st online stage.
- Putting knowledge into practice. After the interactive seminar, our students will work in kindergartens of Polotsk and Novopolotsk to try themselves as teachers of German and teach children to love it.
Do you want to improve your teaching skills – become a project participant!
Project Curators:
- Lyudmila Semchyonok, senior lecturer at the Department of World Literature and Foreign Languages
- Olga Protas, lecturer at the Department of World Literature and Foreign Languages
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Lyudmila Semchyonok, the Department of World Literature and Foreign Languages