Theme-based teaching and learning

Theme-based teaching and learning using the theme-based ideas in foreign language teaching look at the various stages in the planning teaching around a theme. It is said that theme-based work construct meaningful learning opportunities for children, so careful planning from the teacher would be important. In addition, it is also said that theme-based teaching is building links and connections in the networks of children’s language resources.

Theme-based teaching focuses on how children naturally learn. The potential of this approach is to provide realistic and motivating uses of language, so creative thinking and skilled organization are used like a long list of activities relating to all areas of the curriculum under one theme. For this, it demands years of practicing and experience. Even the expert teacher will need careful planning of a theme, to prepare sub-themes and to identify the language learning goals. Firstly, find a theme. Secondly, plan content. Thirdly, plan language learning tasks. Next, learn language through theme-based teaching and learn vocabulary.

The most profitable aspect in this approach is that it can be related to all the areas in the school curriculum. In consequence, as students are going to be using real language to talk about topic probably they already know something about, this approach is going to turn out to be absolutely communicative and meaningful. The language learning of children is likely to revolve around chunks of discourse learnt from talk, stories and songs, vocabulary development, and some aspects of grammatical knowledge, together with elementary literacy skills.

These days, self-directed learning has been identified as an important skills for students and student-centred teaching approaches have been popular. However, we should not neglect teachers’ role in the classroom. In order for the teacher to be a successful helper teachers will need to maximize the time and talent of them. Doing this can make big difference in the outcome of students. What I mean by saying this is that theme-based approach especially among many other teaching methods need a lot of efforts of teachers, so we try to be more diligent helper for students.