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Longman Keys to Language Teaching\nTeaching English to Children\nWendy A. Scott and Lisbeth H. Ytreberg\nLongman Longman Keys to Language Teaching are full of practical suggestions for lessons and activities which will help you in your daily teaching. They are written in clear, jargon-free English so you can read them quickly and refer to them easily as you need them. The authors are all experienced teachers who give straightforward advice on basic teaching techniques.\n\nTeaching English to Children is a valuable resource book for anyone teaching English to young learners. It is full of ideas and activities which can be adapted for use with children of any age and it gives much practical advice on the planning of lessons and the organisation of the classroom.\n\nIt includes:\n\n• Chapters on the four language skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing with lots of useful games and activities which children will enjoy as they learn these skills.\n• Helpful ideas for ways to organise your lessons and create the right atmosphere for learning – and practical advice on what to do when things go wrong.\n• Suggestions for classroom equipment which you and your students can make quickly and easily yourselves to make learning English fun.\n\nWendy Scott and Lisbeth Ytreberg have wide experience of both initial and in-service teacher training and a clear understanding of the way children think and behave. Wendy Scott is a present English Adviser in the Ministry of Education in Norway and is author of Are You Listening?, a listening comprehension package for young children. Lisbeth Ytreberg is particularly interested in the younger learner and has taught English to young pupils for many years. She is at present a lecturer and supervisor in the English department at Tromsø Teacher Training College in the north of Norway.\n\nISBN 0-582-74606-X Longman Keys to Language Teaching\nSeries Editor: Neville Grant\n\nTeaching English to Children\nWendy A. Scott and Lisbeth H. Ytreberg\n\nLongman\nLondon New York Contents\n\nPreface vii\n1 The young language learner 1\n2 Class management and atmosphere 8\n3 Listening 21\n4 Oral work 33\n5 Reading 49\n6 Writing 68\n7 Topic-based work 84\n8 Planning your work 97\n9 The tools of the trade 108 Preface\n\nTHE TEACHING OF English to young children has become especially important in recent years. One reason for this has been the introduction of primary EFL teaching in a number of European countries - but it is also a world-wide phenomenon. There is a lot of very good teaching in primary EFL classrooms. However, it is a fact that many teachers now find themselves teaching in primary school even though they have not been trained for this level. And even for teachers who have been trained, there is a lack of good books concerning this important area of teaching.\n\nThis book is a resource book of ideas and approaches for use with young children. Wendy Scott and Lisbeth Htreberg have wide experience in teacher training, mainly in Norway. Throughout the book, the writers remind us of what it is to be a child - and help us to adapt our styles of teaching to accommodate the needs and motivations of young learners.\n\nLike the other books in the Longman Keys to Language Teaching series, Teaching English to Children offers sound, practical, down-to-earth advice on useful techniques and approaches in the classroom. This book contains lots of practical ideas for developing the four language skill areas, and illustrates how this work can be organised, and integrated, particularly by means of topic work. All the activities suggested here can be adapted and used with children anywhere, by any teacher.\n\nNeville Grant 1 The young language learner\n\nThe British philosopher John Stuart Mill started to learn Greek at the age of three. Clearly, John Stuart Mill was not an average child. What we are talking about in this chapter is the average child. This book assumes that your pupils are between five and ten or eleven years old. This means that the book covers some of the most vital years in a child's development. All education, including learning a foreign language, should contribute positively to that development.\n\nThere is a big difference between what children of five can do and what children of ten can do. Some children develop early, some later. Some children develop gradually, others in leaps and bounds. It is not possible to say that at the age of five all children can do x, at the age of seven they can all do y, or that at the age of ten they can all do z. But it is possible to point out certain characteristics of young children which you should be aware of and take into account in your teaching. You, as the teacher, are the only one who can see how far up the ladder your individual pupils are. We can only draw your attention to the characteristics of the average child which are relevant for language teaching.\n\nWe have divided the children into two main groups throughout the book - the five to seven year olds and the eight to ten year olds. We are assuming that the five to seven year olds are all at level one, the beginner stage. The eight to ten year olds may also be beginners, or they may have been learning the foreign language for some time, so there are both level one and level two pupils in the eight to ten age group.\n\nFive to seven year olds\n\nWhat five to seven year olds can do at their own level\n• They can talk about what they are doing.\n• They can tell you about what they have done or heard. • They can plan activities.\n• They can argue for something and tell you why they think what they think.\n• They can use logical reasoning.\n• They can use their vivid imaginations.\n• They can use a wide range of intonation patterns in their mother tongue.\n• They can understand direct human interaction.\n\nOther characteristics of the young language learner\n• They know that the world is governed by rules. They may not always understand the rules, but they know that they are there to be obeyed, and the rules help to nurture a feeling of security.\n• They understand situations more quickly than they understand the language used.\n• They use language skills long before they are aware of them. Their own understanding comes through hands and eyes and ears. The physical world is dominant at all times.\n• They are very logical - what you say first happens first. ‘Before you turn off the light, put your book away’ can mean 1 Turn off the light and then 2 put your book away.\n• They have a very short attention and concentration span.\n• Young children sometimes have difficulty in knowing what is fact and what is fiction. The dividing line between the real world and the imaginary world is not clear. When reading a story in a foreign language class of five year olds about a mouse that got lost, the teacher ended the story by saying, ‘But, what’s this in my pocket? I feel something warm and furry and it squeaks.’ She then took a toy mouse out of her pocket accompanied by gasps from her pupils. They had no problem in believing that the mouse had found its way out of the book and into their teacher’s pocket. They simply thought the teacher was wonderful because she had found the lost mouse!\n\n• Young children are often happy playing and working alone but in the company of others. They can be very reluctant to. share. It is often said that children are very self-centred up to the age of six or seven and they cannot see things from someone else’s point of view. This may well be true, but do remember that sometimes pupils don’t want to work together because they don’t see the point. They don’t always understand what we want them to do.\n• The adult world and the child’s world are not the same. Children do not always understand what adults are talking about. Adults do not always understand what children are talking about. The difference is that adults usually find out by asking questions, but children don’t always ask. They either pretend to understand, or they understand in their own terms and do what they think you want them to do.\n• They will seldom admit that they don’t know something either. A visiting friend took a confident five year old to school one day after the child had been going to school for three weeks. It was only when they arrived at a senior’s bus school after forty-five minutes that the visitor realised that the child had no idea where she was. Her mother had asked her several times before she left home if she knew the way, the visitor had asked the same question several times in the forty-five minutes. The child had answered cheerfully and confidently that she knew the way to her school very well!\n• Young children cannot decide for themselves what to learn.\n• Young children love to play, and learn best when they are enjoying themselves. But they also take themselves seriously and like to think that what they are doing is ‘real’ work.\n• Young children are enthusiastic and positive about learning. We all thrive on doing well and being praised for what we do, and this is especially true for young children. It is important to praise them if they are to keep their enthusiasm and feel successful from the beginning. If we label children failures, then they believe us.\n\nEight to ten year olds\nGeneral characteristics\nChildren of five are little children. Children of ten are relatively mature children with an adult side and a childish side. Many of the characteristics listed above will be things of the past. . .\n• Their basic concepts are formed. They have very decided views of the world.\n• They can tell the difference between fact and fiction. • They ask questions all the time.\n• They rely on the spoken word as well as the physical world to convey and understand meaning.\n• They are able to make some decisions about their own learning.\n• They have definite views about what they like and don’t like doing.\n• They have a developed sense of fairness about what happens in the classroom and begin to question the teacher’s decisions.\n• They are able to work with others and learn from others.\n\nLanguage development\nEight to ten year olds have a language with all the basic elements in place. They are competent users of their mother tongue and in this connection they are aware of the main rules of syntax in their own language. By the age of ten children can:\n• understand abstracts\n• understand symbols (beginning with words)\n• generalise and systematise.\n\nThis refers to children’s general language development. When it comes to learning a foreign language, there is still a lot we do not know. There are many similarities between learning one’s mother tongue and learning a foreign language in spite of the differences in age and time available. So far nobody has found a universal pattern of language learning which everyone agrees with. Much seems to depend on which mother tongue the pupils speak and on social and emotional factors in the child’s background. What is clear here is that most eight to ten year olds will have some sort of language awareness and readiness which they bring with them into the foreign language classroom.\n\nThe period from five to ten sees dramatic changes in children, but we cannot say exactly when this happens because it is different for all individuals. The magic age seems to be around seven or eight. At around seven or eight, things seem to fall into place for most children and they begin to make sense of the adult world as we see it.\n\nThink about young children telling jokes. Five year olds laugh because everybody else does, but they don’t always understand the joke. If they are asked to re-tell the joke it will be nonsense. Seven year olds think jokes are funny and they learn them off. by heart. This means that they often get the punch line wrong or have to be prompted. Ten and eleven year olds remember jokes and can work out the punch line from the situation. The system of language and the understanding of it seems to fall into place for many children in the same way.\n\nWhat this means for our teaching\n\nWords are not enough\nDon’t rely on the spoken word only. Most activities for the younger learners should include movement and involve the senses. You will need to have plenty of objects and pictures to work with, and to make full use of the school and your surroundings. Demonstrate what you want them to do. The balance will change as the children get older, but appealing to the senses will always help the pupils to learn.\n\nPlay with the language\nLet the pupils talk to themselves. Make up rhymes, sing songs, tell stories. Play with the language – let them talk nonsense, experiment with words and sounds: ‘Let’s go – pets go.’ ‘Blue eyes – blue pies.’ Playing with the language in this way is very common in first language development and is a very natural stage in the first stages of foreign language learning too.\n\nLanguage as language\nBecoming aware of language as something separate from the events taking place takes time. Most eight to ten year olds already have this awareness in their own language. The spoken word is often accompanied by other clues to meaning – facial expression, movement, etc. We should make full use of these clues. When pupils start to read, the language becomes something permanent and there are fewer other clues to meaning. Pupils can take a book home, they can read it again and again, they can stop, think about the language and work it out. The same is true of writing. So reading and writing are extremely important for the child’s growing awareness of language and for their own growth in the language, although both are very demanding and take time and patience to learn.\n\nVariety in the classroom\nSince concentration and attention spans are short, variety is a must – variety of activity, variety of pace, variety of
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Longman Keys to Language Teaching\nTeaching English to Children\nWendy A. Scott and Lisbeth H. Ytreberg\nLongman Longman Keys to Language Teaching are full of practical suggestions for lessons and activities which will help you in your daily teaching. They are written in clear, jargon-free English so you can read them quickly and refer to them easily as you need them. The authors are all experienced teachers who give straightforward advice on basic teaching techniques.\n\nTeaching English to Children is a valuable resource book for anyone teaching English to young learners. It is full of ideas and activities which can be adapted for use with children of any age and it gives much practical advice on the planning of lessons and the organisation of the classroom.\n\nIt includes:\n\n• Chapters on the four language skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing with lots of useful games and activities which children will enjoy as they learn these skills.\n• Helpful ideas for ways to organise your lessons and create the right atmosphere for learning – and practical advice on what to do when things go wrong.\n• Suggestions for classroom equipment which you and your students can make quickly and easily yourselves to make learning English fun.\n\nWendy Scott and Lisbeth Ytreberg have wide experience of both initial and in-service teacher training and a clear understanding of the way children think and behave. Wendy Scott is a present English Adviser in the Ministry of Education in Norway and is author of Are You Listening?, a listening comprehension package for young children. Lisbeth Ytreberg is particularly interested in the younger learner and has taught English to young pupils for many years. She is at present a lecturer and supervisor in the English department at Tromsø Teacher Training College in the north of Norway.\n\nISBN 0-582-74606-X Longman Keys to Language Teaching\nSeries Editor: Neville Grant\n\nTeaching English to Children\nWendy A. Scott and Lisbeth H. Ytreberg\n\nLongman\nLondon New York Contents\n\nPreface vii\n1 The young language learner 1\n2 Class management and atmosphere 8\n3 Listening 21\n4 Oral work 33\n5 Reading 49\n6 Writing 68\n7 Topic-based work 84\n8 Planning your work 97\n9 The tools of the trade 108 Preface\n\nTHE TEACHING OF English to young children has become especially important in recent years. One reason for this has been the introduction of primary EFL teaching in a number of European countries - but it is also a world-wide phenomenon. There is a lot of very good teaching in primary EFL classrooms. However, it is a fact that many teachers now find themselves teaching in primary school even though they have not been trained for this level. And even for teachers who have been trained, there is a lack of good books concerning this important area of teaching.\n\nThis book is a resource book of ideas and approaches for use with young children. Wendy Scott and Lisbeth Htreberg have wide experience in teacher training, mainly in Norway. Throughout the book, the writers remind us of what it is to be a child - and help us to adapt our styles of teaching to accommodate the needs and motivations of young learners.\n\nLike the other books in the Longman Keys to Language Teaching series, Teaching English to Children offers sound, practical, down-to-earth advice on useful techniques and approaches in the classroom. This book contains lots of practical ideas for developing the four language skill areas, and illustrates how this work can be organised, and integrated, particularly by means of topic work. All the activities suggested here can be adapted and used with children anywhere, by any teacher.\n\nNeville Grant 1 The young language learner\n\nThe British philosopher John Stuart Mill started to learn Greek at the age of three. Clearly, John Stuart Mill was not an average child. What we are talking about in this chapter is the average child. This book assumes that your pupils are between five and ten or eleven years old. This means that the book covers some of the most vital years in a child's development. All education, including learning a foreign language, should contribute positively to that development.\n\nThere is a big difference between what children of five can do and what children of ten can do. Some children develop early, some later. Some children develop gradually, others in leaps and bounds. It is not possible to say that at the age of five all children can do x, at the age of seven they can all do y, or that at the age of ten they can all do z. But it is possible to point out certain characteristics of young children which you should be aware of and take into account in your teaching. You, as the teacher, are the only one who can see how far up the ladder your individual pupils are. We can only draw your attention to the characteristics of the average child which are relevant for language teaching.\n\nWe have divided the children into two main groups throughout the book - the five to seven year olds and the eight to ten year olds. We are assuming that the five to seven year olds are all at level one, the beginner stage. The eight to ten year olds may also be beginners, or they may have been learning the foreign language for some time, so there are both level one and level two pupils in the eight to ten age group.\n\nFive to seven year olds\n\nWhat five to seven year olds can do at their own level\n• They can talk about what they are doing.\n• They can tell you about what they have done or heard. • They can plan activities.\n• They can argue for something and tell you why they think what they think.\n• They can use logical reasoning.\n• They can use their vivid imaginations.\n• They can use a wide range of intonation patterns in their mother tongue.\n• They can understand direct human interaction.\n\nOther characteristics of the young language learner\n• They know that the world is governed by rules. They may not always understand the rules, but they know that they are there to be obeyed, and the rules help to nurture a feeling of security.\n• They understand situations more quickly than they understand the language used.\n• They use language skills long before they are aware of them. Their own understanding comes through hands and eyes and ears. The physical world is dominant at all times.\n• They are very logical - what you say first happens first. ‘Before you turn off the light, put your book away’ can mean 1 Turn off the light and then 2 put your book away.\n• They have a very short attention and concentration span.\n• Young children sometimes have difficulty in knowing what is fact and what is fiction. The dividing line between the real world and the imaginary world is not clear. When reading a story in a foreign language class of five year olds about a mouse that got lost, the teacher ended the story by saying, ‘But, what’s this in my pocket? I feel something warm and furry and it squeaks.’ She then took a toy mouse out of her pocket accompanied by gasps from her pupils. They had no problem in believing that the mouse had found its way out of the book and into their teacher’s pocket. They simply thought the teacher was wonderful because she had found the lost mouse!\n\n• Young children are often happy playing and working alone but in the company of others. They can be very reluctant to. share. It is often said that children are very self-centred up to the age of six or seven and they cannot see things from someone else’s point of view. This may well be true, but do remember that sometimes pupils don’t want to work together because they don’t see the point. They don’t always understand what we want them to do.\n• The adult world and the child’s world are not the same. Children do not always understand what adults are talking about. Adults do not always understand what children are talking about. The difference is that adults usually find out by asking questions, but children don’t always ask. They either pretend to understand, or they understand in their own terms and do what they think you want them to do.\n• They will seldom admit that they don’t know something either. A visiting friend took a confident five year old to school one day after the child had been going to school for three weeks. It was only when they arrived at a senior’s bus school after forty-five minutes that the visitor realised that the child had no idea where she was. Her mother had asked her several times before she left home if she knew the way, the visitor had asked the same question several times in the forty-five minutes. The child had answered cheerfully and confidently that she knew the way to her school very well!\n• Young children cannot decide for themselves what to learn.\n• Young children love to play, and learn best when they are enjoying themselves. But they also take themselves seriously and like to think that what they are doing is ‘real’ work.\n• Young children are enthusiastic and positive about learning. We all thrive on doing well and being praised for what we do, and this is especially true for young children. It is important to praise them if they are to keep their enthusiasm and feel successful from the beginning. If we label children failures, then they believe us.\n\nEight to ten year olds\nGeneral characteristics\nChildren of five are little children. Children of ten are relatively mature children with an adult side and a childish side. Many of the characteristics listed above will be things of the past. . .\n• Their basic concepts are formed. They have very decided views of the world.\n• They can tell the difference between fact and fiction. • They ask questions all the time.\n• They rely on the spoken word as well as the physical world to convey and understand meaning.\n• They are able to make some decisions about their own learning.\n• They have definite views about what they like and don’t like doing.\n• They have a developed sense of fairness about what happens in the classroom and begin to question the teacher’s decisions.\n• They are able to work with others and learn from others.\n\nLanguage development\nEight to ten year olds have a language with all the basic elements in place. They are competent users of their mother tongue and in this connection they are aware of the main rules of syntax in their own language. By the age of ten children can:\n• understand abstracts\n• understand symbols (beginning with words)\n• generalise and systematise.\n\nThis refers to children’s general language development. When it comes to learning a foreign language, there is still a lot we do not know. There are many similarities between learning one’s mother tongue and learning a foreign language in spite of the differences in age and time available. So far nobody has found a universal pattern of language learning which everyone agrees with. Much seems to depend on which mother tongue the pupils speak and on social and emotional factors in the child’s background. What is clear here is that most eight to ten year olds will have some sort of language awareness and readiness which they bring with them into the foreign language classroom.\n\nThe period from five to ten sees dramatic changes in children, but we cannot say exactly when this happens because it is different for all individuals. The magic age seems to be around seven or eight. At around seven or eight, things seem to fall into place for most children and they begin to make sense of the adult world as we see it.\n\nThink about young children telling jokes. Five year olds laugh because everybody else does, but they don’t always understand the joke. If they are asked to re-tell the joke it will be nonsense. Seven year olds think jokes are funny and they learn them off. by heart. This means that they often get the punch line wrong or have to be prompted. Ten and eleven year olds remember jokes and can work out the punch line from the situation. The system of language and the understanding of it seems to fall into place for many children in the same way.\n\nWhat this means for our teaching\n\nWords are not enough\nDon’t rely on the spoken word only. Most activities for the younger learners should include movement and involve the senses. You will need to have plenty of objects and pictures to work with, and to make full use of the school and your surroundings. Demonstrate what you want them to do. The balance will change as the children get older, but appealing to the senses will always help the pupils to learn.\n\nPlay with the language\nLet the pupils talk to themselves. Make up rhymes, sing songs, tell stories. Play with the language – let them talk nonsense, experiment with words and sounds: ‘Let’s go – pets go.’ ‘Blue eyes – blue pies.’ Playing with the language in this way is very common in first language development and is a very natural stage in the first stages of foreign language learning too.\n\nLanguage as language\nBecoming aware of language as something separate from the events taking place takes time. Most eight to ten year olds already have this awareness in their own language. The spoken word is often accompanied by other clues to meaning – facial expression, movement, etc. We should make full use of these clues. When pupils start to read, the language becomes something permanent and there are fewer other clues to meaning. Pupils can take a book home, they can read it again and again, they can stop, think about the language and work it out. The same is true of writing. So reading and writing are extremely important for the child’s growing awareness of language and for their own growth in the language, although both are very demanding and take time and patience to learn.\n\nVariety in the classroom\nSince concentration and attention spans are short, variety is a must – variety of activity, variety of pace, variety of