One of my current batch of kindergarten students is the most silent student I’ve ever taught. I’ve been teaching her for six months, and I was started to doubt if she could speak at all. I’m not talking about someone that is shy and reserved. I’m not talking about someone that only spoke Korean to other students. This girl didn’t talk to anyone, any time, ever.
She could have been mute for all I knew, but I wondered why someone would would enroll a mute girl in an English class. The other students thought she needed special help, but she was clearly one of the brightest students in the class. She understood most of my questions, and knew what to do on her work, but she simply would not speak.
When she really needed to say something or do something in class, I would bend down and wait for her to speak. For the first four months, I got no response from this. I never punished her. I never demanded she speak. I simply gave her the chance to speak to me if she wanted to privately. It turns out she was only comfortable whispering at first.
After four months of waiting for a response, she started whispering to me last month. It was very quiet, and she wouldn’t repeat herself, but she would speak only if I placed my ear near her and waited patiently. This wasn’t something that would happen everyday. The girl usually liked to sit next to me too, so I could tell she was feeling more comfortable in class.
She had plenty of opportunities to talk in class today. When we were working on our worksheet for the day, she grabbed my arm and whispered to me that she didn’t color the eyes of her panda correctly and she wanted help fixing them. This was the first time she ever talked to me without being prompted in all the time I had taught her.
Today was also the day after a nice rain storm, which means one thing: Mosquitoes in the school! It’s something of a tradition in the school to be teaching English while swatting mosquitoes at the same time. It doesn’t matter how many times they fumigate, the little buggers return. In the kindergarten class the students noticed there were two or more insects buzzing around. One landed next to the quiet girl and was persistent in its annoyance of her.
She grabbed my arm to tell me she had something to say. I bent down and she told me that there was a mosquito on the table. We went to smash it, but it flew away and attacked her some more. Eventually the class cornered it and I got to slay the beast in a valiant battle. The girl again pulled my arm and told me that there was another mosquito flying around. I couldn’t hear (or didn’t understand) the next few words, so she actually cupped her hands around her mouth and spoke up and said a word audible to the other students close around her to hear. She told me to open the door to let the mosquito outside. It was the first time her voice was anything loud enough to not be confused for a sigh.
It’s really cool that this girl is slowly growing in confidence and trust enough to go from absolute silence to a more confident form of speech with me. The girl clearly likes me, as she’ll give me letters with adorable backwards written Korean characters. She also comes back into the class after everyone leaves to wave goodbye as well. I make sure to give her praise every day and encourage her to speak at her own pace, never embarrass her, and always give her my ear, pun intended, when she has something to say. I’ll be extremely proud if I ever get her speaking like all the other students in class. I’ve got two other students in the class that are extremely shy as well. I want to keep up my current form of motivation to see if it will help bring them out of their shells as well.
