Real objects that we can easily bring into the classroom can be used to teach vocabulary, as prompts for practising grammatical structures or for building dialogues and narratives, for games and quizzes. Realia also include real texts, such as menus, timetables, leaflets, etc.
Flashcards
Like realia, flashcards can be used for teaching individual words or as prompts for practising grammatical structures.
Puppets
Puppets are an excellent resource for teaching young learners. For example, we can introduce new language in dialogues between pairs of puppets (or between one puppet and the teacher). Children can also make their own simple puppets.
Charts
We can use posters and wallcharts (drawings or graphs that can be put on the wall of a classroom) to display larger, more detailed pictures, or a series of pictures telling a story or showing related objects in a lexical set. A phonemic chart shows the phonemic symbols and the positions in the mouth where the different sounds are made. The teacher can point at the symbols to prompt learners to correct their pronunciation. (See Unit 3 for an example of a phonemic chart.) We can also use charts to display diagrams, prepared drawings and tables of irregular verbs, or to build up a class dictionary.
The teacher
The teacher can use hand gestures, facial expressions and mime (actions which express meaning without words) to elicit vocabulary items, clarify meaning and create context. We can also build up a set of signals, such as in finger correction, which learners recognise as prompts to correct their own mistakes.
