100% (or almost 100%) IN POLISH!
Speak Polish! Kind of obvious, but... If you speak English or any other language for most of the lesson, it’s YOU who practises their language skills, not your students. There’s a common misconception about teaching Polish: when teaching a group of beginners it isn’t possible to use Polish only, especially during the first few lessons. Well, it IS possible! Obviously, you need to simplify the language register a lot, use your body language and visual aids, and first of all, you need to adapt the material to the specific moment of the course or lesson. Clearly, you are not going to start the first class (beginner course) with the past tense, but with introductions and alphabet, and the phrase „Co słychać?“ (How’s it going?) you’re likely to introduce at the beginning rather than the end of the lesson.
THE STRUCTURE OF A LESSON
Remember about the structure of your lesson. No matter how long the Polish lesson is, your student should go through the following stages: warm-up – review of the last lesson – introduction of new material – drilling new material – student’s performance – summary. Remember about the margin of error for your students, do not correct every single mistake that lower level students make. The less advanced the student, the larger the margin of error is acceptable.
When introducing grammar, remember: first an example, which you analyse, and then the rule (never the other way round). For homework your students can practise grammar in a fun way: application Polish for Foreigners (available also on iOS, iPAD and Windows).
Better to do less but properly, than more but just whiz through it. If you provide students with too much material during a lesson, they won’t memorize it all anyway.
YOUR STUDENTS
Listen to your students, pay attention to their verbal and non-verbal signals, find out what they’re interested in, ask them questions (without invading their privacy) and remember that being a Polish teacher you often meet people of different cultural background, confession or having values different from yours. Respect that!
One of the pictures you can find on our facebook page PoPolskuPFP. What grammatical problem does it help to explain?
