Week 4

Week 4 started with the continuation of the presentation. My group was the fifth. We presented on sub-topic 1.2: Children's creative use of limited language resources. In the presentation, we explained that children are actually creative with grammatical forms and concepts. For example, a child who said "don't unring" when she wants to tell a telephone caller to wait. This happens when the need to communicate has been temporarily intensified by some activity which regenerates real interaction or calls on the imagination. This means that when there is a spontaneous need to response to what someone have just said. Even as adult, when our mind do not know the exact, for example, English words, we will use other words from other language or a newly creative word to communicate with others. There are a few ways to enhance children creative language skills. One is to provide occasion for them to express themselves and the other one is to encourage children to construct language game actively.

Personally, this is a very interesting fact which educators can utilize to help students learning. Language games like hot seating can gives children occasion to express themselves as questions are being posted by teacher and students spontaneously. Teacher should focus on every word that the students speaks and when any "creative" grammatical forms and concepts came out, teacher should take note and correct the students indirectly. Perhaps teachers can identify the most common "creative" mistake made and he/she can teach that to the whole class as a short lesson itself. On the other hand, if it is just one student, teacher can meet up with the student one by one or just whisper to the student the correct concept or word to be used.