New Teaching

Method Benefits Islands Children

From Ralph Craib, in Pago Pago

Australia’s huge post-war im

migration boom has resulted in an unpredictable benefit for hundreds of small Polynesian children watching schoolhouse television screens here.

FOR it was during the Common wealth’s migrant expansion in 1950 that George Pittman, a one time Western Australian high school teacher, devised an unusual method of teaching spoken English to the foreign-born.

And Pittman’s method has become an important part of the new $1.6 million educational television system in American Samoa.

Pittman’s English-teaching “break through” involves the use of class room situations which require young sters to repeat simple statements— but statements that vary immediately in gender, number and tense.

The variation takes the boredom out of recitation and it also teaches English grammar and structure al though the students are not aware they are learning it.

Sound Repetition

Repetition of sounds found in English is also basic in the Pittman method, called the Australian method in some other areas where it is in use.

Pittman, a French and German teacher in Western Australian high schools for 15 years before World War 11, was, in 1950, in charge of a staff of 150 instructors at immigra tion centres established throughout Australia to give “crash” courses in English to migrants newly-arrived in Australia, He was forced to abandon some traditional concepts of teaching be cause he had neither trained teachers nor the years normally required to give his students complete mastery of a new tongue.

He devised what he calls a “system of oral repetition based on situations in the classroom”.

The system worked so well, he believes, that the highly motivated adult students learned in a few weeks what would have taken two years in

conventional classroom foreign lan guage instruction.

The system was refined afte: Pittman left the Commonwealtl Office of Education to serve ai Director of Education of Nauru fo: eight years and during his servici as foundation director of the Englisl Language Institute of Victoria Uni versity at Wellington, New Zealand He is now the language teachinj specialist of the South Pacific Com mission at Noumea, and part-tinn consultant to the Department o Education of American Samoa on thi oral English TV courses.

Oral Practice “In teaching a language,” he says “the problem is to organise the maxi mum possible amount of oral prac tice.”

The Pittman system—with care

fully-thought-out, constantly-changinj

sentences about classroom situations little stories about things the childrei see—provides “generation of motiva tion”, its innovator says, and thu makes recitation attractive.

The difference between teachinj English in Samoa and teaching it ii American or Australian schools i that in American or Australia! schools “even the smallest tots brinj the spoken language with them” oi their first day of school.

In Samoa, as Pittman says th( language “must be put into them”.

This is being done by telecastinj Pittman’s classroom-situation metho< to remote village classrooms. Sevei highly-trained American mainlam teachers and two research teacher appear before television tapinj cameras in the busy studios o KVZK-TV, Pago Pago’s new educa tional television station.

Speaking of TV education ii Samoa, Mr. Pittman says: “I ha( completely under - estimated hov effective this medium might be. It ii an incredible new tool for teaching.’

He adds that it is. too early tc make a definite evaluation, but earlj results have been good “and the over all impression is a favourable one”.

American educators at Samoar schools have been less restricted David Lommen, who gives the English sound drills on KVZK-TV said that he was told the Polynesia! youngsters would never be able to pronounce the “th” and “sss” sound' so common in English. Since then his face and his repeated voice drills have become familiar to American Samoan youngsters.

And now, sometimes when he takes a walk, he is followed by small kids dancing after him, all shouting “th sss—■—th sss”.