ema ro20 cng Uo) Cee Tt (3 dh ed rs Pe mT nk EL ee nee = | ae ~ — K 4 =: iTeaching Languages to Young Learners faghshcologyCAMBRIDGE LANGUAGE TEACHING LIBRARY A series covering central issues in language teaching and learning, by authors who have expert knowledge in their field. . In this series: Affect in Language Learning edited by Jane Arnold Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching by Jack C. Richards and Theodore S. Rodgers Beyond Training by Jack C. Richards Classroom Decision-Making edited by Michael Breen and Andrew Littlejohn Collaborative Action Research for English Language Teachers by Anne Burns , Collaborative Language Leaming and Teaching edited by David Nunan Communicative Language Teaching by William Littlewood Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom by David Nunan_ Developing Reading Skills by Frangoise Grellet Developments in English for Specific Purposes by Tony Dudley-Evans and Maggie Jo St. John Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers by Michael McCarthy Discourse and Language Education by Evelyn Hatch English for Academic Purposes by R.R. Jordan English for Specific Purposes by Tom Hutchinson and Alan Waters Establishing Self-Access by David Gardner and Lindsay Miller Foreign and Second Language Leaming by William Littlewood Language Learning in Intercultural Perspective edited by Michael Byram and Michael Fleming The Language Teaching Matrix by Jack C. Richards Language Test Construction and Evaluation by J. Charles Alderson, Caroline Clapham, and Dianne Wall ~ Learner-centredness as Language Education by Jan Tudor Managing Curricular Innovation by Numa Markee Materials Development in Language Teaching edited by Brian Tomlinson Psychology for Language Teachers by Marion Williams and Robert L. Burden Research Methods in Language Learning by David Nunait Second Language Teacher Education edited by Jack C. Richards and David Nunan Society and the Language Classroom edited by Hywel Coleman ‘Teacher Learning in Language Teaching edited by Donald Freeman and Jack C. Richards Teaching the Spoken Language by Gillian Brown and George Yule Understanding Research in Second Language Learning by James Dean Brown Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy edited by Norbert Schmitt and Michael McCarthy Vocabulary, Semantics, and Language Education by Evelyn Hatch and Cheryl Brown Voices from the Language Classroom edited by Kathleen M. Bailey and David NunanTeaching Languages to Young Learners Lynne Cameron CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESSCAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo , Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521774345 © Cambridge University Press 2001 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2001 8th printing 2005 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication ts available from the British Library ISBN-13 978-0-521-77434-5 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-77434-9 paperbackFor Nick and NeilContents Preface Acknowledgements “1 / Children learning a foreign language ii Taking a learning-centred perspective 12 4.3 L4 1.5 1.6 t.7 1.8 2 21 2.2 2.3 24 25 2.6 2.7 2.8 29 3 3. 3.2 343 3-4 3-5 Piaget ‘Vygotsky Bruner From leaming to language learning Advantages to starting young with foreign languages The foreign language: describing the indivisible Summary of key learning principles Learning language through tasks and activities The task as an environment for learning Task demands . Task support Balancing demands and support The importance of language learning goals Defining ‘task’ for young learner classrooms Stages in a classroom task Hani’s Weekend: Possible preparation and follow-up activities Task-as-plan and task-in-action ‘ Learning the spoken language Learning the spoken language: guiding principles Discourse and discourse events Meaning first Analysis of a task-in-action Discourse skills development in childhood page xi 21 22 22 25 26 28 29 3I vilContents 3.6 Effective support for children’s foreign language discourse skills 58 3.7 Short activities for learning the spoken language 60 3.8 Supporting the spoken language with written language 66 3-9 Using dialogues 68 3.10 Summary , 70 - / “4. Learning words 72 4:1 Introduction 72 4.2 Vocabulary development in children’s language learning 73 4.3 Organisation of words ina language 81 4.4 Learning and teaching vocabulary - 83 4.5 Children’s vocabulary learning strategies , 92° 4.6 Summary 94 5 . Learning grammar 96 5. Aplace for grammar? 96 5.2 Different meanings of ‘grammar’ 98 5.3 Development of the internal grammar TOL 5.4 A learning-centred approach to teaching grammar: background ros 5.5 Principles for learning-centred grammar teaching I10 5.6 Teaching techniques for supporting grammar learning ZIT 5.7 Summary I21 6 Learning literacy skills 123 6.1 Introduction 123 6.2 Literacy skills in English 124 6.3 Factors affecting learning to read in English as a foreign language 134 6.4 Starting to read and write in English as a foreign language 139 6.§ Continuing to learn to read . 150 6.6 Developing reading and writing as discourse skills 154 6.7 Summary and conclusion ES7 ‘7 Learning through stories 159 7-1 Stories and themes as holistic approaches to language teaching and learning I59 7.2 The discourse organisation of stories 160 7-3 Language use in stories 163 7-4 Quality in stories 166 7.§ Choosing stories to promote language learning 167 villContents 7-6 Ways of using a story 169 7.7, Developing tasks around a story 175 7.8 Summary 179 8 Theme-based teaching and learning 180 8.x Issues around theme-based teaching 180 8.2 Theme-based teaching of a foreign language x8x 8.3 Planning theme-based teaching 184 8.4 Learning language through theme-based teaching 191 8.5 Increasing target language use in theme-based teaching 195 8.6 Summary 197 9 Language choice and language learning 199 g.1 Introduction 199 9.2 Patterns of first language use in foreign language classrooms 200 9.3 Dynamics of language choice and use 205 9.4 Taking responsibility, making choices 209 9.5 Summary 2x3 Go ,Assessment and language learning 214 oz Issues in assessing children’s language learning 204 zo.2 Principles for assessing children’s language learning 218 10.3 Key concepts in assessment 222 10.4 Teacher assessment of language learning 228 10.5 — Self-assessment and learner autonomy 233 10.6 Use of assessment information 238 10.7 Messages from assessment 240 x1 Issues around teaching children a foreign language 24% rz.r Review of ideas 24 11.2 The need for research 242 rr.3 The need to develop pedagogy 243 x1x.4 Teaching foreign languages to children 246 References 247 Index 256Preface This is a book about teaching that puts learning in the centre of the frame. Teaching and learning are not two sides of the same coin, but are essentially .different activities, although they both take place in the public arena of the classroom. This book aims to help readers to make teaching more effective, by attending to learning and the inner mental world of the learner, and by then understanding how classroom activities and teacher decisions can create, or limit, children’s opportu- nities for learning. Teaching foreign languages to young children, which in this book will mean those between five and twelve years of age, has been happening for a long time; in many African and Asian countries, primary children have long been taught French or English as preparation for their use as a medium of instruction. In Europe and South America, the last ten years have seen an explosion of English classes, both in state systems and in private language schools. While the recent surge of interest has led to the publication of methodology books (e.g. Brewster et al. 19925 Dunn 1984; Halliwell 1992; Moon 2000; Phillips 1994; Scott and Ytreberg 1990), an accompanying debate about theoretical and research issues has been largely absent (but see Rixon 1999, some chapters of Kennedy and Jarvis 1991, and Brumfit, Moon and Tongue 1991). This book aims to provide teachers, and trainers of teachers, of foreign languages to young learners with a useful and workable theoretical framework and set of principles in which they can embed and develop their practice. In that it can be said to be initiating a much needed process of developing an applied linguistics for reaching foreign lan- guages to young learners. The professionalism of teachers of young learners requires an under- pinning of theoretical knowledge that can help counteract prevalent misunderstandings of the job. These misunderstandings are not just annoying but they may contribute, I believe, to a continuing devalua- tion of teaching languages at primary level. Theorising the teaching of young learners has an important role to play in compleéxifying over- xiPreface simplifications about working with children and thereby increasing the quality of foreign language education. Misunderstandings about teaching young learners (1): teaching children is straightforward - In many societies, teaching children is seen as an extension of mothering rather than as an intellectual enterprise. Teachers at primary level are then often given less training, lower status, and lower pay, than their colleagues in the same educational system who teach teenagérs or adults. : Children do have a less complicated view of the world than older children and adults, but this fact does not imply that teaching children is simple or straightforward. On the contrary, the teacher of children needs to be highly skilled to reach into children’s worlds and lead them to develop their understandings towards more formal, more extensive and differently organised concepts. Primary teachers need to understand how children make sense of the world and how they learn; they need skills of analysing learning tasks and of using language to teach new ideas to groups and classes of children. . Teaching languages to children needs all the skills of the good primary teacher in managing children and keeping them on task, plus a knowledge of the language, of language teaching, and of language learning. Misunderstandings about teaching young learners (2): children only need to learn simple language It is also misleading to think thar children will only learn simple language, such as colours and numbers, nursery chymes and songs, and talking about themselves. Of course, if that.is all they are taught, that will be all that they can learn. But children can always do more than we think they can; they have huge learning potential, and the foreign language classroom does them a disservice if we do not exploit that potential. Teachers often tell me that they worry about their ‘slow learners’. When E talk to the children and watch lessons, I do see some children struggling with written English, but more often I see ‘fast’ learners who already know most of the vocabulary in their text books and are keen to use their English to talk about international topics like football, pop music and clothes. Many children around the world, including those who live in isolated communities, become part of a xiiPreface - global community of English language users when they watch television and use.computers. Children need moré than ‘simple’ language in the sense that only ‘simple’ topics are covered. Children are interested, or can be interested, in topics that are complicated (like dinosaurs and evolution}, difficult (like how computers work), and abstract (like why people pollute their own environment or commit crimes). This is one reason why, in this book, I avoid taking a so-called ‘child-centred?’ approach, and adopt instead a learning-cemtred approach, hoping to avoid patronising children by assuming limits to their interests. There is a second way in which children need more than ‘simple’ language, and that is in terms of language structures. It is becoming clearer and clearer that first language development builds from a lexical base, and that grammar emerges from lexical and communicative development. Children use supposedly ‘difficult’ structures in their first languages as part of their lexical repertoires. In foreign language teaching, some syllabuses for primary children look rather like watered- down secondary syllabuses, which present children with just a few of the structures typically found early on at secondary level, such as the Present Continuous tense for describing current actions, Simple Present for describing habitual action, and prepositions. In this way, adding on primary level language teaching in a school system merely stretches out what has been done before over a longer period of time. It may be more fruitful to consider the possibility of primary level language teaching providing children with a broad discourse and lexical syllabus, that then changes focus as they move into later stages. If children learn a foreign language from the age of 5 or 6 until they leave school at about 16 years old, there is time to be imaginative with the syllabus and methodology, changing as the child changes and grows. This prospect should be of interest and concern to secondary sectors too; as language learning begins at younger and younger ages, children will arrive in secondary classrooms with much higher and more diverse levels of the foreign language than teachers will have been accustomed to. The organisation of the book The book starts with a review of learning theories and language learning research that offer insights in how to think about young children learning a foreign language (FL). A central principle for teaching young learners is that children should be supported in constructing meaning for every activity and language use in the FL classroom, and that understanding is essential for effective learning. From this, the second chapter focuses on tasks and activities, and the language learning xiiiPreface opportunities they create. It develops a set of principles and a frame- work that teachers can use to analyse language teaching tasks and activities from a learning perspective. Chapter 3 attends to the language that is the content of teaching, and starts from the premise that young learners will work mostly with the spoken language. Vocabulary and discourse are taken as offering the most meaningful ways into a foreign language, and children’s use of these in the foreign language are discussed through analysis of classroom data from Norway. Different types of spoken language practice activities are described, Chapter 4 takes vocabulary as a starting point and links vocabulary development in the foreign’ language to children’s conceptual develop- ment. Grammar is the topic of Chapter 5; the place of grammar in young learner classrooms is discussed in terms of children’s emergent understandings of the FL system and how activities can support this without confusing children by going beyond their cognitive capabilities at different ages. Chapter 6 deals with literacy in the foreign language, with a particular focus on the early stages of learning to read. This is a complex area with little research evidence available, and suggestions for practice are made based on current thinking in Lx (first language) reading and theoretical analysis of cross-linguistic factors. © Chapters 7 and 8 consider the discourse-level approaches of stories and theme-based learning. They apply the ideas of earlier chapters, bringing them together to explore how these approaches can best help language learning. In Chapter 9, the sometimes controversial topic of the use of the mother tongue and target language in the FL classroom is tackled from a learning-centred viewpoint. By looking at the functions of language use, I suggest how teachers might switch between languages with the deliberate aim of supporting language development. Chapter ro identifies issues in the assessment of FL learning by children, and deals in some depth with classroom-based assessment. “The final chapter returns to the big issues in teaching young learners, some of which have knock-on impact on language teaching more generally. I set out an agenda for curriculum design, for research into early language learning, and for further theory development, hoping that this will ‘help develop this new and exciting field further. A note on which language is the foreign language is needed. My own foreign language teaching experience is restricted to English, as will be obvious from the data and examples used in the book. Much of the book will be applicable to the teaching of other languages to children, and where this is the case, I talk more generally in terms of ‘the foreign language’. In some sections that involve language-specific analysis, the discussions will apply only to English: for example, in Chapter 6 where xivPreface . literacy in English is explored. I apologise for being unable to offer alternatives to English at these points and trust that those interested in the teaching of languages other than English will carry out analyses of these languages to fill the gap. The differences between English and other languages that emerge in this process will be important for the development of language teaching. Teachers of young learners may, I suspect, have more fun, as well as more frustration, than teachers of older learners. Throughout my life in education I have found that working with children continually surprises and offers new perspectives, even on the most profound or theoretical ideas. I hope that theorising and developing the teaching of young leamers may likewise challenge and offer new ways of thinking to longer-established areas of applied linguistics and language teaching.Acknowledgements {would like to thank all those teachers in Malaysia, Norway, Malta, the Sultanate of Oman, and many other countries, who have shared their classrooms and ideas with me over the years. Their commitment and enthusiasm has motivated me to write this book. I would like to acknowledge the debt I owe to colleagues at the University of Leeds, particularly Jennifer Jarvis; 1 have learnt much from working with her on young learners’ courses. She highlighted for me the importance of Margaret Donaldson’s work on children’s views on intention and purpose that are developed in Chapter 1. The ideas in Chapter 2 on task support and demands benefited greatly from working with Jayne Moon and others. Thanks_also to Mickey Bonin at Cam- bridge University Press for his support and perceptive advice. The publishers and I are grateful to the following copyright owners for permission to reproduce copyright material: Ministry of Education, the Sultanate of Oman for Hani’s Weekend in Chapter 2; NFS Forlaget (Norway) and WSOY (Finland) for the animal pictures in Chapter 3; Penguin Books for the pictures and text from Dinosaurs by Michael Foreman in Chapter 7; Pearson Education for the figure from Teaching Primary Children English by S. Halliwell; Cambridge University Press for Cambridge English For Schools by Andrew Littlejohn and Diane Hicks; Playway to English by Ginter Gerngross and Herbert Puchta..1. Children learning a foreign language 4.1 Taking a learning-centred perspective What is different about teaching a foreign language to children, in contrast to teaching adults or adolescents? Some differences are imme~ diately obvious: children are often more enthusiastic and lively as learners. They want to please the teacher rather than their peer group. They will have a go at an activity even when they don’t quite understand why or how. However, they also lose interest more quickly and are less able to keep themselves motivated on tasks they find difficult. Children do not find it as easy to use language to talk about language; in other words, they do not have the same access as older learners to meta- language that teachers can use to explain about grammar or discourse. Children often seem less embarrassed than adults at talking in a new language, and their lack of inhibition seems to help them get a more native-like accent. But these are generalisations which hide the detail of different children, and of the skills involved in teaching them. We need to unpack the generalisations to find out what lies underneath as characteristic of children as language learners. We will find that important differences do arise from the linguistic, psychological and social development of the learners, and that, as a result, we need to adjust the way we think about the language we teach and the classroom activities we use. Although conventional language teaching terms like ‘grammar’ and ‘listening’ are used in connection with the young learner classroom, understanding of what these mean to the children who are learning them may need to differ from how they are understood in mainstream language teaching. In the learning-centred perspective taken in this book, knowledge about children’s learning is seen as central to effective teaching. Successful lessons and activities are those that are tuned to the learning needs of pupils, rather than to the demands of the next text-book unit, or to the interests of the teacher. I distinguish a learming-centred perspective from ‘learner-centred’ teaching. Learner-centred teaching places the child at the centre of teacher thinking and curriculum planning. While this is a great improvement on placing the subject or the curriculum at the centre, I have found that it is not enough. In centring on the child, we risk losing sight of what it is we are trying to do in schools, and of the enormous potential that lies beyond the child. ITeaching Languages to Young Learners Imagine a child standing at the edge of a new country that represents new ideas and all that can be learnt; ahead of the child are paths through valleys and forests, mountains to be climbed and cities to be explored. The child, however, may not be aware of the vast possibilities on offer, and, being a child, may either be content with the first stream or field s/he comes across, or may rush from one new place to the next without stopping to really explore any. If a teacher’s concern is centred on the child, there is a temptation to stay in that first place or to follow the child. I have seen too many classrooms where learners are enjoying themselves on intellectually undemanding tasks bur failing to learn as much as they might. The time available in busy school timetables for language teaching is too short to waste on activities that are fun but do not maximise learning. The teacher has to do what the child may not be able to do: to keep in sight the longer view, and move the child towards increasingly demanding challenges, so that no learning potential is wasted. A learning-centred perspective on teaching will, I believe, help us to do that more effectively. Tn this chapter I give an overview of theory and research relevant to children’s language learning. The field of teaching young learners, particularly in teaching English, has expanded enormously in the last x0 years but is only just beginning to be researched. We need therefore to draw on work from beyond language classrooms: in child development, in learning theory, in first languagé development, and in the develop- ment of a second language in bilingual contexts. Implications for teaching young learners are taken from each of these and used to establish guiding principles and a theoretical framework to be devel- oped in the rest of the book. I begin with the work of two of the major theorists in developmental psychology, Piaget and Vygotsky, high- lighting key ideas from their work that can inform how we think of the child as a language learner. 1.2 Piaget 1.2.1 The child as active learner Piaget’s concern was with how young children function in the world that surrounds them, and how this influences their mental development. The child is seen as continually interacting with the world around her/him, solving problems that are presented by the environment. It is through taking action to solve problems that learning occurs. For example, a very young child might encounter the problem of how to get food from her bowl into her mouth. In solving the problem, with a spoon or with 2Children learning a foreign language fingers, the child learns the muscle control and dixection-finding needed to feed herself. The knowledge that results from such action is not imitated or in-born, but is actively constructed by the child. What happens early on with concrete objects, continues to happen in the mind, as problems are confronted internally, and action taken to solve them or think them’ through. In this way, thought is seen as deriving from action; action is internalised, or carried out mentally in the imagination, and in this way thinking develops. Piaget gives a much less important role to language in cognitive development than does Vygotsky. It is action, rather than the development of the first language which, for Piaget, is fundamental to cognitive development. Piagetian psychology differentiates two ways in which development can take place as a result of activity: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation happens when action takes place without any change to the child; accommodation involves the child adjusting to fearures of the environment in some way. Returning to the example of feeding, let’s imagine what might happen when a child, who has learnt to use a spoon, is presented with a fork to eat with. She may first use the fork in just the same way as the spoon was used; this is assimilation of the new tool to existing skills and knowledge. When the child realises that the prongs of the fork offer new eating opportunities — spiking food rather than just ‘spooning’ it— accommodation occurs; the child’s actions and knowledge adapt to the new possibility and something new is created. These two adaptive processes, although essentially different, happen together. Assimilation and accommodation are initially adaptive processes of behaviour, but they become processes of thinking. Accommodation is an important idea that has been taken into second language learning under the label ‘restructuring’, used to refer to the re-organisation of mental representations of a language (McLaughlin 1992). We will encounter it again when we consider the development of grammar. From a Piagetian viewpoint, a child’s chinking develops as gradual growth of knowledge and intellectual skills towards a final stage of formal, logical thinking. However, gradual growth is punctuated with certain fundamental changes, which cause the child to pass through a series of stages. At each stage, the child is capable of some types of thinking but still incapable of others. In particular, the Piagetian end- point of development — thinking that can manipulate formal abstract categories using rules of logic — is held to be unavailable to childrén before they reach 11 years of age or more. The experimental studies used to support Piaget’s theories have been criticised for not being sufficiently child-friendly, and for underesti- mating what children are capable of. In a series of ingenious experi- ments, Margaret Donaldson and her colleagues have convincingly 3Teaching Languages to Young Learners. shown that when appropriate language, objects and tasks are used, very young children are capable of many of the ways of thinking that Piaget held too advanced for them, including formal, logical’ thought (Donaldson 1978). These results undermine some of Piaget’s theoretical views, particularly the notion of discrete stages and the idea that children cannot do certain things if they have not yet ‘reached’ that stage. An example of how stage theory can lead to restricting children’s learning occurred in the UK in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Before children were allowed to start writing sentences, they had to complete sets of ‘writing readiness’ activities that worked on part-skills. In spending so long on writing patterns and bits of letter shapes, they were missing out on the more holistic experiences that also help children understand the purposes of writing as communication. An important dimension of children’s lives that Piaget neglects is the social; it is the child on his or her own in the world that concerns him, rather than the child in communication with adults and other children. As we will see, Vygotsky’s ideas give a much greater priority to social interaction. 1.2.2 Implications of Piagetian theory for language ieaming The child as sense-maker We can take from Piaget the very important idea of the child as an active learner and thinker, constructing his or her own knowledge from working with objects or ideas. Donaldson’s work emphasises that (the child) actively tries to make sense of the world ... asks questions, . . . wants to know... Also from a very early stage, the child has purposes and intentions: he wants to do. (Donald~ son 1978: 86, my emphasis) Children also, seek out intentions and purposes in what they see other people doing, bringing their knowledge and experience to their attempts to make sense of other people’s actions and language. Realising that children are active ‘sense-makers’, but that their sense-making is limited by their experience, is a key to understanding how they respond to tasks and activities in the language classroom that we will use throughout this book. The world as offering opportunities for leaming If we take Piaget’s idea that children adapt through experiences with objects in their environment, and turn it around, we can see how that 4Children learning a foreign language environment provides the setting for development through the opportu- nities it offers the child for action. Transferring this idea metaphorically to thé abstract world of learning and ideas, we can think of the classroom and classroom activities as creating and offering opportu- nities to learners for learning. This view coincides with ‘ecological thinking that sees events and activities as offering affordances or opportunities for use and interaction that depend on who is involved (Gibson 1979): for example, to a human being, a tree ‘affords’ shelter from the rain or firewood, to a bird, the same tree ‘affords’ a nest site or buds to eat. 1.3 Vygotsky 1.3.1 The child as social Vygotsky's views of development differ from Piaget’s in the importance he gives to language and to other people in the child’s world. Although Vygotsky’s theory is currently most noted for his central focus on the social, and modern developments are often labelled: ‘sociocultural theory’, he did not. neglect the individual or individual cognitive development. The development of the child’s first language in the second year of life is held to generate a fundamental shift in cognitive development. Language provides the child with a new tool, opens up new opportunities for doing things and for organising information through the use of words as symbols. Young children can often be heard talking to themselves and organising themselves as they carry out tasks or play, in what is called private speech. As children get older they speak jess and less aloud, and differentiate berween social speech for others and ‘inner speech’, which continues to play an important role in regulating and controlling behaviour (Wertsch 1985). Adults sometimes resort to speaking aloud when faced with a tricky task, like finding the way to an unfamiliar place, verbalising to help themselves think and recall: Turn left then right at the roundabout... In considering the early speech of infants and its development into language, Vygotsky (1962) distinguishes the outward talk and what is happening in the child’s mind. The infant begins with using single words, but these words convey’ whole messages: when a child says juice, she may mean I want some more juice or my juice has spilt. As the child’s language develops, the whole undivided thought message can be broken down into smaller units and expressed by putting together words that are now units of talk. : Underlying Vygotskyan theory is the central observation that 5Teaching Languages to Young Learners development and learning take place in a social context, i.e. in a world full of other people, who interact with the child from birth onwards. Whereas for Piaget the child is an active learner alone in a world of objects, for Vygotsky the child is an active learner in a world full of other people. Those people play important roles in helping children to learn, bringing objects and ideas to their attention, talking while playing and about playing, reading stories, asking questions. In a whole range of ways, adults mediate the world for children and make it accessible to them. The.ability to lear through instruction and mediation is char- acteristic of human intelligence. With the help of adults, children can do and understand much more than they can on their own. To illustrate this idea, let’s return to the example of the baby learning to feed herself with a spoon, At some point in learning to use a spoon to eat with, the baby may be able to get the spoon in the food and can put a spoonful of food in her mouth, but cannot quite manage the middle step of filling the spoon with food. A helpful adult may assist the baby with the difficult part by purting his hand over the baby’s and guiding it in filling the spoon. In this way, adult and child together achieve what the baby was unable to do by herself, and the baby receives some useful training in turning the spoon at the angle needed to get hold of the food. Before Jong the baby will master this step and can be left to do the whole feeding process by herself. The adult could have helped the baby in many different ways, including just doing it all to save time and mess! The kind of spoon-filling help, targeted at what the baby can nearly but not quite do herself, is seen as particularly useful in promoting develop- ment; filling the spoon with food was an action in the baby’s zone of proximal development (or ZPD). We can note before we leave this example that parents are often very ‘tuned-in’ to their own children and know exactly what help is needed next, and that skilful teachers also manage to do this in a class of thirty or more different ZPDs. Vygotsky used the idea of the ZPD to give a new meaning to ‘intelligence’. Rather than measuring intelligence by what a child can do alone, Vygotsky suggested that intelligence was better measured by what a child can do with skilled help. Different children at the same point in development will make different uses of the same help from an adult. Take as an example seven or eight year olds learning to do arithmetic and perhaps meeting subtraction problems for the first time. For some pupils, a demonstration by the teacher using counting bricks may be all they need to grasp the idea and do other sums of the same type. Others will be able to do the same sum again but not be able to generalise to other sums. In foreign language learning, we might imagine children listening to the teacher model a new question: Do you like swimming? and being encouraged to ask similar questions. One 6Children learning a foreign language _ child may be able to use other phrases he has learnt previously and say Do you like drinking orange juice? whereas another may be able to repeat Do you like swimming? and yet another would have trouble repeating it accurately. In each case, the ZPD, or what the child can do with the help of the adult is different; this, Vygotsky suggested, is a more useful measure of intelligence or ability. Learning to do things and learning to think are both helped by interacting with an adult. Vygotsky saw the child as first doing things in a social context, with other people and language helping in various ways, and gradually shifting away from reliance on others to indepen- dent action and thinking. This shift from thinking aloud and talking through what is being done, to thinking inside the head, is called internalisation. Wertsch (x985) emphasises that internalisation for Vygotsky was not just a transfer but also a transformation; being able to think about something is qualitatively different from being able to do it. In the internalising process, the interpersonal, joint talk and joint activity, later becomes intrapersonal, mental action by one individual. 1.3.2 Implications of Vygotskyan theory for language learning Words and meanings The importance of the word as unit has been downplayed by those who have developed Vygotsky’s theories (e.g. Lantolf 2000). However, I believe that words do have a special significance for children learning a new language. The word is a recognisable linguistic unit for children in their first language and so they will notice words in the new language. Often too we teach children ‘words in the new language by showing them objects that they can see and touch, and that have single word labels in the first language. From their earliest lessons, children are encouraged to think of the new language as a set of words, although of course this may not be the only way they think of it. The importance of the word as unit is underscored by recent research into word frequency and use undertaken by corpus linguists, and the discovery that much of our knowledge of our first language can be accounted for by the information we build up over time about statistical probabilities of which words are used with which other words. The zone of proximal development Many of Vygotsky’s ideas will help in constructing a theoretical frame- work for teaching foreign languages to children. In deciding what a 7Teaching Languages to Young Learners teacher can do to support learning, we can use the idea that the adult tries to mediate what next it is the child can learn; this has applications in both lesson planning and in how teachers talk to pupils minute by minute. In the next chapter I develop a framework for ‘analysing classroom tasks that incorporates the notion of the ZPD. We can look at stages in tasks for how well they help a child to move in language skills from the interpersonal to the intrapersonal. Learning as internalisation The concept of internalisation will be used in later chapters to woder- stand learning processes in the foreign language. The new language is first used meaningfully by teacher and pupils, and later it is transformed and internalised to become part of the individual child’s language skills or knowledge 1.4 Bruner 1.4.1 Scaffolding and routines For Bruner, language is the most important tool for cognitive growth, and he has investigated how adults use language to mediate the world for children and help them to solve problems (Bruner 1983, 1990). Talk that supports a child in carrying our an activity, as a kind of verbal version of the fine-tuned help given in the baby feeding example above, has been labelled scaffolding (Wood, Bruner and Ross 1976). In experi- ments with American mothers and children, parents who scaffolded tasks effectively for children did the following: © they made the children interested in the task; they simplified the task, often by breaking it down into smaller steps; e they kept the child on track towards completing the task by reminding the child of what the goal was; e they pointed out what was important to do or showed the child other ways of doing parts of the tasks; they controlled the child’s frustration during the task; © they demonstrated an idealised version of the task. Moreover, good scaffolding was tuned to the needs of the child and adjusted as the child became more competent. Scaffolding has been _ transferred to the classroom and teacher-pupil talk. Wood (1998) suggests that teachers can scaffold children’s learning in various ways:Children learning a foreign language Table 1.1 Teachers can help children to By attend to what is relevant suggesting praising the significant . providing focusing activities adopt useful strategies encouraging rehearsal being explicit about organisation remember the whole task and goals reminding modelling providing part-whole activities (from Wood 1998) Each of these teaching strategies can be applied to language teaching. The notion of helping children attend to what is important will recur in various topics, and echoes discussions in English language teaching about ‘noticing’ (e.g. Schmidt x990). In directing attention and in remembering the whole task and goals on behalf of the learner, the teacher is doing what children are not yet able to do for themselves. ‘When they focus on some part of a task or the language they want to use, children may not be able to keep in mind the larger task or commu- nicative aim because of limits to their attentional capacity. Between them, teacher and pupils manage the whole task, but the way in which the parts and aspects are divided up varies with age and experience. The teacher does most of the managing of joint engagement on a task. Bruner has provided a further useful idea for language teaching in his notions of formats and routines. These are features of events that allow scaffolding to take place, and combine the security of the familiar with the excitement of the new, Brunes’s most useful example of a routine is of parents reading stories to their children from babyhood onwards (see also Garton and Pratt 1998), I will develop ic at some length, both because it clarifies the important idea of routines, and also because it will be used in later discussions of the role of stories in language classrooms. In situations where parents read bedtime stories to their children (Bruner researched middle-class American families), the routine that is followed at the same time each day goes something like this: the child sits on the parent’s lap with a large picture story book, and parent and child turn the pages together. As the child gets older, the type of book changes and the roles of adult and child change, but the basic format remains. When action and language use are analysed, another layer of routine emerges. With very young childéen, adults do most of the talking, describing the characters and objects in the pictures and 2Teaching Languages to Young Learners involving the child with instructions, tag questions and talk about salient images, such as Look at the clown, He’s got a big nose, basn’t he? The child can be further involved by being asked to point to known pictures: Where’s the clown? and where’s his big nose? As the child learns to talk, so the child’s verbal involvement increases as she or he joins in naming pictures and events. Over any short period of time, the language used by the parent includes a jot of repetition, and uses finely tuned language that the child, helped by the pictures, can make sense of. The book-reading event is scaffolded by the adult to let the child participate at the level he or she is capable of. The repeated language allows the child to predict what is coming and thus to join in, verbally or non-verbally. At a later stage, when the five or six year old child is beginning to read, the format may be much the same, with the routine and language more advanced. At this stage, the parent may read the story aloud as well as ask questions about the pictures. The child may finish sentences, recalling how the story ends from memory of previous reading events. Later still, the child may read the story to the parent. Notice how novelty and change are incorporated alongside the familiar security of the routine, and how the child can participate at an increasingly more demanding level as the parent reduces the scaffolding. Again, language use is predictable within the routine, but there is a ‘space’ within which the child can take over and do the language her/ himself. This space for growth ideally matches the child’s zone of proximal development. Bruner suggests that these routines and their adjustment provide an important site for language and cognitive devel- opment. 1.4.2 Routines in the language classroom Transferring to the language classroom, we can see how classroom routines, which happen every day, may provide opportunities for language development. One immediate example would be in classroom management, such as giving out paper and scissors for making activities. As a routine, this would always take basically the same form: for example, the teacher talking to the whole class, organising distribution, perhaps using children as monitors; the scissors might be kept in a box, the paper in a cupboard. The language used would suit the task and the pupils’ levels so early stage learners might hear, George, please give out the scissors. Margaret, please give out the paper. The context and the familiarity of the event provide an opportunity for pupils to predict meaning and intention, but the routine also offers a way to add variation and novelty that can involve more complex language: Sam, IoChildren learning a foreign language -please ask everybody if they want white paper or black paper, or Give out a pair of scissors to each group. As the language becomes more complex, the support to meaning that comes from the routine and the situation helps the children to continue to understand. The increased complexity of language provides a space for language growth; if the new language is within a child’s ZPD, she or he will make sense of it and start the process of internalising it. Routines then can provide opportunities for meaningful language development; they allow the child to actively make sense of new language from familiar experience and provide a space for language growth. Routines will open up many possibilities for developing lan- guage skills. 1.5 From learning to language learning 1.5.1 First, second and foreign languages The first sections of this chapter have reviewed important theories of learning that yield valuable tools for theorising the teaching of lan- guages to young learners. They have been largely concerned with the learning of children in general rather than the learning of language. In the second half of the chapter, 1 review theory and research that are relevant to the learning of foreign languages by children. To help us understand the nature of language learning, we can draw on studies of first language acquisition and from North American research into second language development in children. Howeyer, the language learning that is studied in these contexts is different in important ways from the learning of a foreign language. When we make use of theory and empirical research from these other situations, we need always to do so with care, extracting what is transferable, and if possible, carrying out research to check that it does transfer. The central characteristics of foreign language learning lie in the amount and type of exposure to the language: there will be very little experience of the language outside the classroom, and encounters with . the language will be through several hours of teaching in a school week. In the case of a global language like English, however, even very young children will encounter the language in use on video, TV, computers and film. What they might not be exposed to is ‘street’ use, i.e. people using the language for everyday life purposes all around them, as might happen in a second language immersion context such as learning French or Engtish in Canada, or an additional language context, such as children of Pakistani heritage in England. In foreign language teaching, IrTeaching Languages to Young Learners there is an onus on the teacher to provide exposure to the language and to provide opportunities for learning through classroom activities. The cultural ‘foreign-ness’ of countries in which the language.is a national language, e.g. Australia, USA or UK for English; France or Canada for French, may be brought into the learning of the language, or it may be considered irrelevant because the motivation for teaching the language is to use it as a lingua franca between non-native speakers. 1.5.3 Learning the first language Tt was thought until quite recently that by the age of 5, first language acquisition was largely complete. We have come to understand that this is not the case. Formal literacy skills are still in the early stages of development at five and six years of age, even though the beginnings of literacy can be traced back to experiences in infancy, such as listening to ~ stories. Some structures in spoken language are acquired late because of their connection with the written language. In English, relative clauses are one example of this: Perera (1984) reports that children of xx years tend not to use relative clauses beginning with whose, or preposition + relative pronoun e.g. in which. She suggests that this is because such structures occur mainly in written text and so children have little experience of them in their early years. Children also have problems using words that express logical relations between ideas, like cause and effect. The full use of co-ordinators, including but and yet, is still to be developed after the age of rz years, and clauses introduced with although or unless can cause problems even for 15 year olds. The meanings of these linking terms are logically complicated and correct use requires the child to have developed both logical understanding and the language in which to express it. If young first language children find such aspects of English difficult then there seems little reason for including them on syllabuses for child learners of English as a foreign language, and the same would be true for similar aspects of other languages. . Discourse skills in the first language continue to develop throughout the early school years. At 7 years of age, children are still acquiring the skills needed for extended discourse. In relling narratives, for example, children are still learning how to create thematic structure through language, and are still developing the full range of uses of pronouns and determiners (Karmiloff-Smith 1986; Snow 1996). Given the importance attached in the methodology literature to using stories in foreign language teaching (e.g. Wright 1997), teachers need to remember that children may still be finding it difficult to use pronouns correctly in their first language to control reference to characters across a sequence of IzChildren learning a foreign language -events and plot actions, and not to demand unreasonable skills in the foreign language. : Important work from the USA is showing that first language profi- ciency does not develop as a single, global phenomenon, but that different domains of language use develop differently (Snow 1996). Ina project to investigate the language development of children aged 14-32 months, language was measured across the linguistic domains of phonology, morphology, lexis, syntax, conversation and discourse, and have been shown to be largely independent. Extended discourse seems to develop differently from conversation. Furthermore, a connection has been found between children’s early experiences with language use in their families, and their language development in various domains. In families where narratives are told around the dinner table, on topics such as what happened to parents at work or siblings at school, children develop narrative and discourse skills faster; children whose families use a wide vocabulary develop faster in the lexical domain. One implication for teachers of foreign languages to young children is that children will come into foreign language learning at the earliest stages bringing with them differently developed skills and learning abilities in their first language. By the age of five, individual differences in language domains will be established and so, for example, some children will find it easier to learn vocabulary.than others, or children with more developed conversational skills may transfer these to the new language more easily than others. From the same language lesson, it is likely that different children will learn different things, depending partly on what they find easier to learn. In Vygotskyan terms, it seems likely that a second or foreign language ZPD may not be global, but that different aspects of language will have different ZPDs. 1.5.2 Learning a second language Age and second language leaming It has long been hypothesised that children leam a second language better than adults, and this is often used to support the early introduc- tion of foreign language teaching. The Critical Period Hypothesis is the name given to the idea that young children can learn a second language particularly effectively before puberty because their brains are still able to use the mechanisms that assisted first language acquisition. The Critical Period Hypothesis holds that older learners will learn language differently after this stage and, particularly for accent, can never achieve the same levels of proficiency. While some empirical studies offer support for the Critical Period Hypothesis, other studies provide 13Teaching Languages to Young Learners evidence that there is no such cut-off point for language learning. Lightbown and Spada (r999) present some of the evidence for and against the Critical Period Hypothesis, and remind us to attend to-the different needs, motivations and contexts of different groups of learners. They suggest that where native-like proficiency in a second language is the goal, then learning benefits from an early start, but when the goal is communicative ability in a foreign language, the benefits of an early start are much less clear. Further support for making this key distinction comes from a recent study into brain activity during language processing (Kim et al. 1997). This-study discovered.that the brain activity patterns of early bilinguals, who learn two languages at the same time from infancy, differ from those of learners who begin learning a language after about 7 or 8 years of age; different parts of the brain are used for language recall and activation. Foreign language learning of the sort we are concerned with is thus an essentially different mental activity from early simultaneous bilingualism and from Lx acquisition. The influence of the first language on the second The ‘Competition Model’ of linguistic performance is a theory that explains how first language learning may affect subsequent second or foreign language development (Bates and MacWhinney 1989). In this model, different languages have different ways of carrying meaning, and the particular ways in which a language encodes meaning act as ‘cues’ to interpreting the meaning of what is said. For example, word order in English is a very reliable and helpful cue that helps listeners identify Subject and Object, ie. who is acting and on what. In a sentence like the cat ate the snake, the cat and the snake do not have endings that show which is the ‘eater’ (the agent or Subject of the verb) and which is the eaten (acted-on or Object). Ir is their position in the sentence, or the word order, that reveals this; we can tell that the cat is the Subject and does the eating because it comes before the verb, while the snake, which comes after the verb, has to be the Object. Other languages, such as Italian, do not have restrictions on word order in sentences, and so the order of the words does not offer as much information about meaning as in English; word order is a stronger cue in English than in Italian (Liu et al. 1992). All levels of language can provide cues, including lexis, morphology (word endings or prefixes) and phonology (the sound system of a language). Sometimes one source of information reinforces another, and sometimes they conflict, or are in competition, in which case the most reliable cue wins out. Studies carried out across different languages have led to the important conclu- 14Children learning a foreign language sion that children become sensitive to the reliability of cues in their first language from early infancy (Bates e¢ al. 1984). As babies, they learn to pay attention to particular cues which hold useful information for méaning. Later, if faced with trying to understand a second language, they will transfer these first language strategies to make sense of Lz sentences, trying to find information in familiar places. Where two languages make use of very different types of cues, the transfer of strategies from Lz to L2 may not be very fruitful. Leamers may need to be helped to notice and pay attention to the salient cues of the new language. In the case of English, word order is most salient, but so too are word endings that show tense (e.g. walk - ed) and plurality (shop ~ s) (Slobin 1985). Age and first language The cue effect is compounded by an effect of age. In studies of immersion language learning, younger children (7-8 years) seem to pay more attention to sound and prosody (the ‘music’ of an utterance), whereas older children (x2-14 years) are more attentive to cues of word order (Harley et al. 1995). Children are generally less able to give selective and prolonged attention to features of learning tasks than adults, and are more easily diverted and distracted by other pupils. ‘When faced with talk in the new language, they try to understand it in terms of the grammar and salient cues of their first language and also pay particular attention to items of Lz vocabulary that they are familiar with (Harley 1994; Schmidt t990). These findings will not surprise experienced primary teachers, but they give further empirical support to the idea that teachers can help learners by focusing their attention on useful sources of information in the new language, as also suggested by Bruner’s scaffolding studies (section 1.4 above). Which cues need explicit attention will vary with the first language of the learners. How to help pupils do this will be considered in more detail in later chapters, but here I present directing attention as a key principle with many applications in the young learner classroom. The competition model of understanding a second language, and empirical findings that support the view that first language experience influences second language use, remind us that in learning a foreign language, students are learning both the whole and the parts. In this case, the ‘parts’ are tiny aspects of grammar or phonology that are crucial in reaching a ‘whole’ interpretation. tgTeaching Languages to Young Learners Influence of teaching on second language learning There is mounting evidence from foreign language learning contexts of the influence of teaching method on what is learnt. The range of language experiences that children get in their foreign language lessons is likely to influence how their language develops; for example, if lessons provide opportunities to participate in question and answer type talk then they will be good at that but not necessarily at other, more extended, types of talk. Mitchell and Martin (1997). document the different teaching styles and beliefs of teachers of French to 11 year old children (English Lz), and show how this seems to result in children producing certain types of language rather than others. Weinert (1994) details how 11-13 year old learners of German (English Lx) reproduce in their talk the language types used by their teachers. Further research is needed into the extent of this teaching effect on language learning, and at what levels of specificity it operates (see also Chapter 5). Current knowledge reinforces an intuitively obvious notion: foreign language learners who depend on their teachers and texts for most of their exposure and input, will not, if this is restricted in type, develop across the full range of the foreign language. A particular © aspect of this concerns extended discourse, ie. talking at length, and later, writing at length. If, as seems to be the case from the first language research reported above, conversational skills develop independently of extended discourse skills, then we cannot assume that teaching children conversational language will lead to them being able to speak at length in the foreign language, but rather must work on the principle thar if we want children to tell stories or recount events, they need to have experience of how this is done in the foreign language. Modelling of language use by teachers, already seen as an important step in scaffolding (section x.4), needs further to be genre-specific. 1.6 Advantages to starting young with foreign languages Many advantages are claimed for starting to learn a foreign language in the primary years; more evidence is needed to judge how far claims turn into reality. Experience in the UK twenty years ago found that language .Jearning in primary schools was not as positive as expected, although in retrospect this seems likely to be due to how it was implemented and, in particular, to the lack of attention that planners paid to what would happen at secondary level, when FL teachers were faced with mixed classes of beginners and more advanced learners. The social, cultural and political issues around policies of teaching foreign languages early 16Children learning a foreign language . are complex and influence teaching and learning at classroom level. Comparative studies of different socio-political contexts would be useful in investigating these influences and their impact. Published data on the outcomes of early language learning come from the North American experience with immersion teaching, where native speakers of English are placed in French-speaking nursery and infant schools, and vice versa (Harley and Swain 1994; Lightbown and Spada 19943 Harley et al. 1995). In these contexts, children who have an early start develop and maintain advantages in some, but not all, areas of language skills. Listening comprehension benefits most, with overall better outcomes for an earlier start; pronunciation also benefits in the longer term, but this is restricted to learning language in naturalistic contexts, and will not necessarily apply to school-based learning. Younger children learn the grammar of the L2 more slowly than older learners, so that although they start earlier with language learning they make slower progress, and overall gains are not straightforwardly linked to the time spent learning (Harley et al. 199 5). Learning a second language through immersion differs from leartiing a foreign language as a subject lesson several times a week; immersion pupils study school subjects through the second language and thus have more exposure and mote experience with the language. However, it is unlikely that the difference in quantity of language learning -experience will affect the balance of benefits; in foreign language learning too, receptive skills are likely to remain ahead of productive skills, and grammatical knowledge, which is linked not just to language development but to cognitive development, is likely to develop more slowly for younger children. 1.7 The foreign language: describing the indivisible In this section, I present a first dissection of the whole that is ‘language’ into the parts that comprise the content of teaching. In applied linguistics over the last decades, it has been common to divide Janguage into ‘the Four Skills’: Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing, and then to add Grammar, Vocabulary and Phonology to them. This division is not as logical as it may seem and has been challenged (Widdowson 1998). Some syllabuses also deal in Topics, Functions and Notions, describing language in terms of how it is used in communication rather than seeing it as a linguistic system or a set of skills. Because childcen who start learning a foreign language very young may encounter nothing but the spoken language for several years, the customary division into the four skills seems somewhat inappropriate, and an alternative division of language has been attempted. 17Teaching Languages to Young Learners The first cut into the holism of language learning separates literacy skills from the rest, on the basis that learning to read and write in a foreign language presents distinct learning tasks that require teaching. I will argue that teachers need to plan and support literacy skills development informed by specific knowledge and understanding of literacy issues, although of course the learner will, and stiould, experience literacy development as integrated within spoken language development. Having separated out literacy skills development from of the totality of the foreign language, what then remains is much wider than Speaking and Listening as perceived in secondary or adult language teaching. For young learners, spoken language is the medium through which the new language is encountered, understood, practised and learnt. Rather than oral skills being simply one aspect of learning language, the spoken form in the young learner classroom acts as the prime source and site of language learning. New language is largely introduced orally, undex- stood orally and aurally, practised and automatised orally. My solution to the problem of how to divide up oral language learning comes from thinking about how children seek out meanings for themselves in language, and to focus on words and on interaction. For Vygotsky, words label concepts and are an entry point into thinking and networks of meaning. In language teaching terms, the development of words, their meanings and the links between them will be covered under the term Vocabulary. Interaction will be labelled as Discourse skills, and in Chapter 3, will be further divided to reflect the distinction between conversatiénal exchanges and longer stretches of talk that Snow’s work in first’ language development has identified. Instead of thinking about children as ‘doing Listening and Speaking’, we will think about how they learn to interact in the foreign language. Classroom activities can also be seen and analysed as discourse in their own right. Grammar will be seen as emerging from the space between words and discourse in children’s language learning, and as being important in constructing and interpreting meaning accurately. The develop:nent of phonology. is not considered separately in this book, since children seem to develop native-like accents without specific training through expo- sure to good models; it will, however, link into the development of spelling and rhyme (Chapter 6). The organisational scheme for language is summarised in Figure 1.1. The carving up of language learning in this way seems to reflect reasonably well the real experience of young leamers, and the structure of some, at least, of the course books written for them. 18Children learning a foreign language learning the foreign, language a N\ learning oral skills learning the written language LO \ vocabulary discourse i ' a \ ' conversation extended talk t - : “7 eor77 7 grammar — Figure 1.x Dividing up ‘language’ for child foreign language learning - This division is, though, and can only ever be, an artificial breaking up of what grows through an ‘organic’ process in a child’s mind. This is one reason why it is not always possible to predict what will be learnt from what is taught, and why attending to the opportunities offered by activities will be important. 1.8 Summary of key learning principles The chapter concludes with a summary of the principles that have emerged as most important in thinking about young children learning a foreign language. Each of these will be used throughout the rest of the book as we consider concrete examples of what students are asked to do in lessons. Children actively try to construct meaning Children actively try to ‘make sense’, i.e. to find and construct a meaning and purpose for what adults say to them and ask them to do. They can only make sense in terms of their world knowledge, which is limited and partial. Teachers thus need to examine classroom activities from the child’s point of view in order to assess whether pupils will understand what to do or will be able to make sense of new language. 19Teaching Languages to Young Learners Children need space for language growth In both language and cognitive development, the ZPD or immediate potential of the child is of central importance for effective learning. Routines and scaffolding are two types of language-using strategies that seem to be especially helpful in making space for children’s growth. Language in use carries cues to meaning that may not be noticed Children need’ skilled help in noticing and attending to aspects of the foreign language that carry meaning. Since they cannot benefit much from formal grammar, other ways of doing this have to be found. - Development can be seen as internalising from social interaction Language can grow as the child takes over control of language used initially wich other children and adults. Children's foreign language leaming depends on what they experience There are important links between what and how children are taught, and what they learn. Within the ZPD, the broader and richer the language experience that is provided for children, the more they are likely to learn. Foreign language lessons often provide all or most of a child’s experience of the language in use; if we want children to develop certain language skills, we need to ensure they have experiences in lessons that will build those skills. The activities that happen in classrooms create a kind of ‘environ- ment’ for learning and, as such, offer different kinds of opportunities for language learning. Part of teaching skill is to identify the particular opportunities of a task or activity, and then to develop them into learning experiences for the children. In the next chapter, the idea of identifying the language learning opportunities offered by classroom tasks is developed further. 202 Learning language through tasks and activities ‘ ° 2.1 The task as an environment for learning In this chapter I set up a framework for analysing tasks from a learning Perspective that takes account of young learners’ social and cognitive development. Classroom tasks and activities are seen as the ‘environ. ment’ or ‘ecosystem’ (van Geert 1995) in which the growth of skills in the foreign language takes place. The idea of ‘task’ will need to be adapted slightly from the way it is used in current ‘task-based” approaches to language teaching, and will be given a ( (post-)Vygotskyan slant. Our starting point in this chapter is children as (mentally) active learners, who will try to find a meaning and purpose for activities that are presented to them. Young learners work hard to make sense of what teachers ask them to do, and come to tasks with their own under- standings of the purposes and expectations of adults. Studies of young children starting school have shown how much difference there often is between language use and activities at home and at school, but also how quickly children work out what is expected of them and how to fit into the new patterns of interaction (e.g. Tizard and Hughes 1984). We can predict that children will bring these abilities to their language lessons, and that this urge to find meaning and purpose can be a very helpful language learning tool for teachers to exploit. Unfortunately, even the most motivated child can have problems making sense of some of the activities in which they are asked to participate in their language lessons; the combined effect of the activity-type and new language can render everything just too mysterious. Teachers may not notice pupils’ confusion because the children are anxious to please and may act as if they understand. For example, they may pick out and repeat key words from the teacher’s language, giving an illusion of understanding, or they may persevere with a writing or matching task without really under- standing what they are doing. Here again, we see the importance of a learning perspective that will go beyond a superficial evaluation of classroom activity, and give teachers tools for really checking on how much pupils are understanding and learning. ‘We begin by analysing the environment created by an activity in terms of demands on learners (in section 2.2) and support for learning (in section 2.3). In section 2.4 we see how learning opportunities can be deliberately constructed by adjusting the balance between demands and 21Teaching Languages to Young Learners Look at the table. Say sentences. Hani’s weekend Sau Figure 2.1 Hani’s Weekend: an activity from ‘Our World through English’, Activities Book 6E (B), p.18, for xz year olds (Sultanate of Oman) support, and how, if teachers have clear language learning goals, this can be done more effectively (section 2.5). Sections 2.6 and 2.7. set up-a task framework for young learner classrooms, first defining ‘task’, and then showing how staging a task can help learning. In section-2.8, we return to the classroom activity that starts the chapter, applying the task framework to see how learning opportunities might be enhanced. 2.2 Task demands I will use an activity to illustrate the first key points of the task framework, returning in section 2.6 to define ‘task’ more precisely. The activity in Figure 2.1 is taken from a course written for rx year olds in the Sultanate of Oman, who come to this book after learning English for 3 years. The set of course materials, from which this particular activity has been taken, has been carefully thought-out and structured for the target audience. In its context of use, the activity is intended as 22Learning language through tasks and activities practice material, to supplement activities in the Pupils’ Book, and to be used in conjunction with a Teacher’s Book. I have removed the activity from its context in order to analyse its structure and its demands, and the support provided to meet those demands. The basis for this speaking activity is a grid with 2 rows and 3 columns. This type of graphic is frequently found in foreign language materials as a prompt to speaking’ or writing practice. The rows represent the days of the weekend (the Islamic weekend is Thursday and Friday), and the columns show three times in the day: moming, after- . noon and evening. Pupils are required to make up sentences using vocabulary and grammar they have already learnt, and the particular objective is to practise structures like on Thursday afternoon with the past tense, which has been focused on in preceding activities. Each box in the grid is supposed to prompt one sentence of the form: Hani watched television on Thursday afternoon. ‘The original is nicely coloured and care has been taken to use activities familiar to pupils. For the moment, we will ignore the issue of how the teacher might use the course book in the lesson to get pupils started on this activity, and focus just on the demands placed on pupils when they try to make sense of the information given in the grid and use it to produce accurate sentences in English. We will also leave aside, for the time being, the question of whether this is an oral skills task ora grammar task (or both), and take a limited view of the goal of the task as the oral production of sentences, in order to take a learner’s perspective on the text and visuals. The grid must be ‘read’ in a particular way: times of day follow from left to right across the columns, and the days of the week go from top to bottom. As adults, we know this convention and use it automatically; children may not know the conventions so well, and graphical informa- tion may not be accessed as easily by children. In fact, the pupils for whom this was designed read and write their first language, Arabic, from right to left. So, in using the grid, they have to know, and remember to use, the ‘English’ convention of working from left to right across the page. The pictures show boys involved in various activities; the title ‘Hani’s weekend’ suggests that Hani is the central character and he can be seen in each picture, although sometimes he is wearing his white dishdasha and sometimes a green track suit. A pupil must understand this in order for the grid and the task to make sense. In each picture Hani is doing something, so that a further demand on the pupil is to recognise the action from the picture, and then find the English words for that action, e.g. mend his bike. The words must be * 23Teaching Languages to Young Learners produced in the past tense form: e.g. watched, even though there is nothing in the title or the grid to show that these things were done at some point in the past, rather than being planned for the future. The sentences are to be spoken aloud, so that ‘a further demand beyond finding vocabulary and grammar is to pronounce words and find appropriate stress and intonation. These demands on the pupil can be divided into two types of demand: cognitive and language, and are summarised below. Coguitive demands are those related to concepts, and to understanding of the world and other people. Language demands are those related to using the foreign language, and to uses of mother tongue in connection with learning the foreign language. : ~ understand the way the grid works to show times of actions ~ work left to right across columns and top to bottom cognitive demands from one row to next ~ understand that Hani appears in each picture ~ understand that the pictures show past actions ~ recognise the key action in each picture ~ find the vocabulary to describe each action ~ find the past tense ending for each verb ~ put the words together in the right order language demands | ~ pronounce the words ~ give correct stress afd intonation to words and sentence ~ understand teacher’s instructions and explanation, and feedback There may be other demands on the pupils beyond the language and the cognitive. If they are required to do the activity in pairs, then each pupil needs to listen to his or her partner, paying attention to the particular box on the grid being talked about; this would be an interactional demand. Metalinguistic demands would require pupils to understand or use English to talk about the language, e.g. if pupils were instructed ‘use the past tense of the verbs’. Involvement refers to the demand on the child to keep engaged with the task for as long as it takes to complete it; involvement demands will vary with how interesting the task is to the child. With younger children, especially, we need to remember that classroom tasks will present physical demands, sitting still long enough to do the task or using the fine-motor skills required to manipulate a pencil to write, draw or tick boxes. The box below shows a list of types of demands that a task may place on learners: 24Learning language through tasks and activities . Table 2.2 Types of task demand Task Demanps © Cognitive demands vary with the degree of contextualisation of language; difficulty of concepts that are needed to do the task (e.g. use of graphics, colours, telling the time). ‘o Language ‘demands vary with whether the language is spoken or written, understanding or production, extended talk or conversation; with vocabulary and grammar needed; with the genre; with the amount of Lz and Lz. @ Interactional demands vary with the type of interaction required, ¢.g, pair work; with the participants in talk ~ adult / peers; with the nature of the interaction, e.g. question + answer, e Metalinguistic demands may include the use of technical terms about language in production or comprehension e.g. in instructions, in feedback. * Involvement demands vary with the ease or difficulty the learner has in engaging with the task, e.g. length of task stages; links to child’s interest and concerns; novelty, humour, suspense. © Physical demands vary with how long the child must si still for; with actions needed; with fine motor skills needed e.g. to write or draw. The analysis of the demands that a task places on pupils is a key way to assess its suitability and its learning potential. It is, however, only one side of the equation; we also need to look at how the child is supported in achieving the goals of the task. 2.3 Task support The grid in Figure 2.1 has been provided to support the learners’ production of language. It offers support in two ways. Firstly, the 25Teaching Languages to Young Learners pictures provide support for meaning, contextualising the language to be used. Secondly, the structure of the grid supports concepts, by using a graphical way of representing times of day and avoiding the need to-do this through language. Graphics can often concretise quite abstract ideas without requiring the use of language, and can support under- standing of ideas for second language learners (Tang 1992). The use of the rising, full and setting suns in the top row can give added support to recall of the meaning of morning, afternoon and evening. The task includes language support through the use of words and phrases already encountered in earlier lessons. Explanation and modelling of the task by the teacher will provide further support to pupils. They may also be supported by working in pairs and listening to their parmers. We can categorise the types of support for learning in the same way as types of demand. When we think in terms of support, we try to use what the children can already do to help them master new skills and knowledge, or we try to match tasks to children’s natural abilities and inclinations. Examples are given in Table 2.2. 2.4 Balancing demands and support Clearly, -whether learners can do the task, and whether they learn anything by doing it, depends not just on the demands or on the support, but on the dynamic relationship between demands and support. We can here recall the idea of the zone of proximal develop- ment, or space for growth, that children need for their language and cognitive development. If the demands are too high, learners will find the task too difficult; they are likely to ‘switch off? and not finish the task, or to finish it as well as they can, using what they know to complete the task burt not using the language intended..In either case, learning goals are not achieved. Perhaps, most dangerously of all for future learning, children may appear to the teacher to have completed the task, but may not have understood it or learnt from it. The teacher may then try to build on the unlearnt language in future lessons, and for a time may appear to succeed. Pupils’ problems can remain hidden, particularly in contexts where the teacher leads and controls classroom activity very strongly, until revealed by some crisis, such as end of year examinations. While the desire of young children to please adults and participate as much as they can is one of the very positive sides of teaching young leamers, we need to be aware that it can also hide a multitude of problems. If a task provides too much support, then learners will not be ‘stretched’. A very common example of too much support is the teacher’s 26Learning language through tasks and activities . Table 2.2 Types of task support Task Support © Cognitive support can come from the contextualisation of language; from the use of concepts already developed; from familiar formats of graphics or activity; from familiar topics and content, e Language support can come from re-use of language already mastered; from moving from easier domain to more difficult, e.g. spoken to written; from using known vocabulary and grammar to help with the new; from use of Lr to support La development. * Loteractional support can come from the type of interaction, e.g. paix work; from-helpful co-participants; from the use of familiar routines. © Metalinguistic support can come from familiar technical terms to talk abour new language; clear explanations. Involvement support can come from content and activity that is easy for the learner to engage with, e.g. links to child’s interest and concerns; from mixing physical movement and calm, seated activities, # Physical variation in sitting and moving; use of familiar actions; match to level of fine motor skills development, e.g. to write or draw. use of the first language to explain the meaning of a reading text; this provides so much support to understanding that the learners do not need to think about the foreign language or to use more than just single words (see Chapter 9). In trying to strike a balance between demands and support, we can apply what cognitive scientists call ‘the Goldilocks principle’: a task that is going to help the learner learn more language is one that is demanding but not too demanding, that provides support but not too much support. The difference between demands and support creates the space for growth and produces opportunities for learning. An analogy may help capture this idea. Imagine that you are working 27Teaching Languages to Young Learners out in a gym and lifting weights. Your aim is to increase the size of weights you can lift, or the number of times you lift a weight. Either increase is an advance in fitness and can represent language learning. Now, the way to get fitter is not to try to pick up a weight that is very much heavier than the one you can lift at the moment, nor is it to use a weight much lighter. If the weight is too heavy (or task demands too great or support not enough), you will just fail to lift ir alrogether or, if you do manage to lift it, may well cause injury. If the weight is too light (demands too low or support too great), you will be able to lift the weight (complete the task) very easily, but it won’t increase your fitness. What will promote increased fimess (or learning) is to work with a weight that is just a little bit heavier than your usual weight, so that muscles can adapt to the increase, and then, through practice, the new’ weight will become your new current limit. The process can then be repeated with a slightly heavier weight still. Over time, you will become able to lift much heavier weights, but at no time will the strain have been too great! Language learning for an individual can be seen similarly as a repeated process of stretching resources slightly beyond the current limit into the ZPD or space for growth, consolidating new skills, and then moving on to the next challenge. 2.5 The importance of language learning goals How then can teachers achieve the most useful balance of demands and support when they plan lessons and adapt tasks from course books? If language learning is made the focus of this issue, the question then becomes, ‘How can teachers ensure that the balance of demands and support produces language learning?’ The answer we will pursue is that the teacher, in planning, must set clear and appropriate language learning goals. As a bald statement, this may sound rather obvious. After all, surely language learning is a goal for all language teaching? At a general level, this may be so, but it does not always seem to be the case for individual lessons and tasks. Moreover, goals that result in learning need to be tailored to paiticular learners: The course book or syllabus may dictate what is to be taught, but what is to be learnt can only be planned by a teacher who knows the pupils, and can make the book or syllabus work for them. Learning goals are objectives or intended learning for particular learners working ‘on particular tasks, made specific from the general learning aims of book or syllabus. : In setting clear and specific language learning goals, teachers are scaffolding the task for children. Further scaffolding can involve 28Learning language through tasks and activities - breaking down tasks into manageable steps, each with its own sub- goals. The teacher takes responsibility for the whole task while learners work on each step at a time. Careful design of sub-goals should help ensure success and achievement at each step, and of the task as a whole. Young learners face many years of classroom lessons and it is important that they feel, and are, successful from the start. Tod many demands early on will make them anxious and fearful of the foreign language; too few demands will make language learning seem boring. Careful selection and grading of goals is one of the key tools available to teachers to build success into learning. In primary language classrooms there is a further force that may shift teaching away from learning, and that is the borrowing of materials and activities from general primary practice. This transfer of methodology happens rather often at primary level, partly because of the methodolo- gical vacuum in teaching young learners, and partly because primary practice has some genuinely good techniques and ideas thar clearly work well with children. My point is not that such transfer is wrong, but that, when ideas are transferred, they need to be adapted for the new aim of language learning. Thinking through the demands, support and learning opportunities of activities may help in this adaptation. Prime examples of techniques transferred from primary education would be theme-based learning and the use of songs and rhymes. Theme-based learning will be further discussed in Chapter 9, and rhymes will be shown to be useful in early literacy (Chapter 6). 2.6 Defining ‘task’ for young learner classrooms My aim in this section is to produce a list of defining features of task for use in teaching foreign languages to children. I am not interested in an abstract concept of task but in a unit of activity that can be used for lesson planning and evaluation, and which will also work as a unit of analysis in research by teachers or by researchers coming into class- rooms (Cameron 1997). I begin by seeing how the ways in which the term ‘task’ is commonly used in language teaching can contribute to re- defining for teaching children. One way in which the construct ‘task’ entered language teaching was through work with adults, who needed to use the second language outside the classroom (Breen 1984; Nunan 1989, 1993). For these learners, there was sometimes a marked contrast between the kinds of activities they did in classrooms and the kind of activities they needed English for in their lives outside the classroom, and tasks were adopted as a unit that would try to bring the classroom and ‘real’ life closer 29Teaching Languages to Young Learners together. The goals and outcomes of tasks were to relate to the real needs of learners, such as reading bus timetables or buying cinema tickets. Some writers argued that materials used should be real and. authentic too, while others suggested that authenticity of texts was too difficult as a requirement but that authenticity of activities, or of interaction of learner and text, was more desirable (Breen 1984, Widdowson 1990). The latest versions: of ‘task-based learning’ (TBL) locate real-ness in outcome, with learners working together to do things like ‘solve a problem, do a puzzle, play a game or share and compare experiences’ (Willis 1996). A young learner version of a task-based syllabus was tried out in the Bangalore project twenty years ‘ago (Prabhu 1987), with children working on maths, geography or other problems through English. : . In all these developments, the essential aspect of a ‘task’ is that learners were focused on the meaning of content rather than on form, ie. the learners’ goals and task outcomes are not explicitly language- focused. Recently there has been something of a return to form as needing attention too (Ellis 1994; Kowal and Swain 1994). We will explore this in more detail in Chapter 5 when we look at grammar, but it is of relevance here to note that the most meaning-focused of all . language learning contexts, immersion, is where problems with lack of attention to form have been discovered (Lightbown and Spada 1993). Children in immersion classes, who have studied school subjects through their second language, are found to develop language skills that match their native-speaking peers on listening skills and pronunciation, but lag behind in grammatical accuracy and precision. It seems that focusing on meaning is important, but is not enough for continued language development. Language for young learners raises more problems with the notion of ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ language use. Many children do not use the foreign language much outside the classroom, except.perhaps on holiday, with tourists to their country, and when using computers. Beyond these limited domains, their outside lives do not readily provide a needs- related syllabus for foreign language learning. Furthermore, their adult lives and possible needs for the language are still too far away to give content to lessons; 7 and 8 year olds have little need to book holiday accommodation or even give directions! What ‘real language use’ (Skehan 1995: 23) is for these children is not obvious; it might be seen as the language used by native speaker 7 and 8 year olds, but by the time they have learnt it, they will be 9 and xo year olds, and will no longer need to talk about, say, teddy bears or dolls. The best we can do is aim for dynamic congruence: choosing activities and content that are appropriate for the children’s age and socio-cultural experience, and 3°Learning language through tasks and activities _ language that will grow with the children, in that, although some vocabulary will no longer be needed, most of the language will provide a useful base for more grown-up purposes. From this point of view, school activities ave congruent with chil- dren’s lives, and using English to take the register or sing songs is quite real enough. It seems appropriate that tasks can be defined as classroom activities. However, not all activities that take place in a classroom will qualify as ‘tasks’; an activity’can be any kind of event that children participate in, but a task has further features. As with our demand and support analysis of the grid task at the start of this chapter, learner Participation is the pivot around which classroom tasks are to be examined. There must be something unified and coherent, for learners, about a task. Rather than taking outcomes as criterial as in Willis’ and Skehan’s form of TBL, the focus is on how the goals and action create a unified whole (Coughlan and Duff 1994). A classroom task will have a clear beginning and end; it may be quite short or it may last over several lessons. For the child, a classroom task should have a clear purpose and meaning; for the teacher, the task should have clear language learning goals. Key features of classroom tasks for children learning a foreign anguage are summarised as follows: Classroom tasks for children learning a foreign language e have coherence and unity for learners (from topic, activity and / or outcome) © have meaning and purpose for learners @ have clear language learning goals . @ have a beginning and end © involve the learners actively If we think about these features in singing songs, we can see that although any instance of singing is an activity, only the more carefully planned and structured events using songs will be classed as ‘language earning tasks’. This perspective turns the song into a tool for language teaching and learning, that can be effectively planned, implemented and evaluated. 2.7 Stages in a classroom task In this section, a further aspect is added to the framework of classroom tasks, and that is the notion of steps or stages. In teaching reading skills, 3mTeaching Languages to Young Learners it has been common practice for many years to plan reading activities in three stages: pre-reading, reading and post-reading. The three stage format has been applied to listening, to mainstream task-based learning . (Skehan 1996) and to activiry-based language learning in primary class- rooms (Vale 1990). | adopt it here too, with the following labels: PREPARATION —+ CORE ACTIVITY +> FOLLOW UP. The ‘core activity’ is central to the task, just as the earth has a hot, molten core or an apple has its pips inside the core. Without the core, the task would collapse. The core activity is set up through its language learning goals. Preparation activities prepare the learners to be able to complete the core activity successfully, and raight include pre-teaching of language items or activation of topic vocabulary. The ‘follow-up’ stage builds on successful completion of the core, perhaps with a public performance of work done in the core or with written work based on oral language used in the core. Since one task can lead to another, the follow up of the first may be, or lead into, the ‘preparation’ stage of the next. As an example of how the stages can combine to produce a task, we can return to Hani and his weekend, and place the production of oral sentences from the grid as the core activity in the centre of an imaginary task. We can then fill out the task with possible preparation and follow- up activities. . 2.8 Hani’s Weekend: Possible preparation and follow-up activities Given the core goals of pupils saying sentences about each picture in the grid, it seems helpful for the preparation stage to activate the vocabu- lary that will be needed, i.e. the action verbs and the names of objects and places in the pictures. This can be done using the pictures from the grid in Figure 2.1, but with a small adjustment: the pictures are used one-by-one rather than in combination, and are blown up in size for whole class work (or changed into big, quickly done sketches by the teacher straight on to the board). Each picture can then be used with the class as support to recall words for objects, people, places, and actions. In the core activity, the same pictures will be used, and the link made at preparation stage between picture, form and meaning will be available as support for sentence production. There is however a more weighty demand for pupils in this task than the lexis: having to understand why a past tense form is needed, constructing the past tense form, and producing it in a sentence with the 32Learning language through tasks and activities 24.2.0% mending _ ended im riding + rode L| watching > watched oO Figure 2.2 The board divided into two, to highlight meaning and form of Past verb tenses. (Note: the boxes represent pictures.) time phrases such as on Thursday evening. To support these demands, the teacher could make one small but crucial change to the information and then use simple graphics. The small change that I suggest might really help pupils understand the meaning of the grammar, i.e. why the Past Tense is needed, is to add dates (e.g. 24th, 2 sth February, when the class takes place in March) to the grid, so that it is not just any weekend that is being talked about, but a particular weekend that has passed. Alternatively, the weekend could be some holiday or festival that has just passed. Either way, making the weekend clearly specific to the pupils gives a support to their understanding that the weekend activities need to be talked about in the past tense. It is likely that when shown the pictures, pupils will produce verb forms such as mending. The teacher can then use a graphical prompt to support the production of the correct form, dividing the board into two with a vertical line, and writing the selected (past) date on one side (Figure 2.2). Holding the picture on the undated side, the teacher can use the form mending; moving the picture to the dated side, the teacher can produce the past form mended, emphasising the ending with stress or, if the word is written down, with a different colour or underliriing. Other verbs can be practised in the same way. : Practice with the past tense forms and pictures (still separately, rather than in the grid) could be done by pupils in pairs, as extra preparation. At the end of the preparation stage, pupils should be ready to move on to the core activity, supported by the teacher first modelling for the students how to ‘read? information from the chart. A large grid could be constructed on the board, placing the large pictures one by one on to the grid as the sentences are modelled. Follow-up activities could develop written production, by pupils writing down the sentences about Hani, and then writing about their own weekend, using the same phrases or ones that they choose. The task is summarised on the grid in Figure 2.3. The three stages of the task appear in the columns. For each stage, working downwards 33 ,Teaching Languages to Young Learners ny TASK Say sentences about Hani’s weekend Preparation Core activity Follow up Language | Activate previously | Oral production of | Written production learning Jearnt lexis. sentences from grid. } of Hani sentences.” goals Practise past forms Composition of own of verbs, sentences. Teacher-led: (x) Use of single (x) Whole class (t) Teacher writes - Activities | pictures to prompt | introduction of grid | key words on board, recall of lexis. and teacher model- | .next to pictures.” ling of sentences. . (2) Divide board (2) Teacher models into two and recall/ | (2) Pair production | writing sentence practise past forms. | of sentences: e.g. Px | from grid. points toa box and | (3) Pupils write sentences. (3) Pairs practise P2 says sentence. (4) Pair checking of with single pictures. accuracy. To recall lexis, or to | To recall lexis and | Writing in English. re-learn. verb forms from (see Ch. 6). Demands preparation stage, on To understand idea Remembering words jearners of past eventsand | To ‘read’ the grid. | and forms from core. use of tense to , express this, etc. (see Table 2.2). | Finding words for _ jews activities. Pictures of familiax | Familiar pictures. | Teacher modelling. . events. Addition of dates to | Key words on board. Support Teacher modelling | grid. Teacher feedback for of lexis and forms. | Preparation stage | while writing. learning Pair work. practice of forms. | Teacher provides Teacher modelling. | new words for Pair work. pupils’ own sentences. Figure 2.3 Hani’s weekend: turning an activity into a task through the'column, we first see the language learning goals that are set for the stage. The activities that will take place.are then listed in the next box. Below that, the activities are analysed in terms of demands and support. The grid as a whole displays the planning that would underpin the task. 34Learning language through tasks and activities Of course, none of the activities I have suggested are groundbreaking, or even very exciting! However, I have tried to show how thinking - about demands, support and goals can help to plan carefully linked stages that scaffold the pupils’ language use towards language learning. We should also notice the important point that making very small changes to the information (adding dates) or to the activity (using separated pictures singly) can lead to very large changes in the task as experienced by pupils. This is a very powerful tool: if teachers have repertoires of such small changes, they can use them to adapt and adjust tasks found in course books to suit particular learners. 2.9 Task-as-plan and task-in-action At the beginning of this chapter, we used the metaphor of the task as creating an environment in which learning can occur. We have seen that this environment can be better understood by analysing the demands and support of activities. In the last section, the course book task has been adapted by adding more activities to produce an environment in which (imaginary) students might be able to meet the demands and achieve language learning goals. In many ways, this analysis was an unrealistic exercise, because we did not know much about the specific pupils or teachers who might use the grid, how the teacher might introduce it, or what language pupils would bring to making sense of it. If we had that information, we could have produced a much tighter analysis. However, it would still have been an analysis of a plan, and we still would not know what actually happened when the activity was used in action with a particular class, unless we observed and recorded the lessons. In order to help maintain a clear distinction between what is planned and what happens in practice, we can label the two ‘task-as- plan’ and ‘task-as-action’ (after Breen 1987). Until the task is tumed into action, it cannot be fully evaluated for its usefulness or effectiveness. However, the different aspects of tasks introduced in this chapter can all be used for evaluating tasks-in-action, once they have been identified in the task-as-plan. In the next chapter, data recorded in classrooms will allow us to analyse a task-in-action, as we use the grid and task analysis to discuss an oral task from a Norwegian primary school, and oral skills development more generally. 353 Learning the spoken language 3.1 Learning the spoken language: guiding principles Following the division of language skills set out in section 1.7, this chapter deals with the development of children’s skills in using the spoken language. The chapter is built around two ‘guiding principles’ for teaching. Meaning must come first: if children do not understand the spoken language, they cannot learn it. © To learn discourse skills, children need both to participate in discourse and to build up knowledge and skills for participation. Central to the chapter is an analysis of children using their foreign language in a real classroom task-in-action (section 2.9); we will see how the teacher and task construct.an environment for the use and learning of the language. The chapter begins by establishing how the term ‘discourse’ will be used. Section 3.3 turns to meaning in discourse; a child’s search to find meaning in language can drive language learning but will need support from the teacher. The differing demands of speaking and listening as a discourse participant are set out. In section 3.4, the talk of pupils and teacher on a classroom task is analysed in some detail, using the concepts of demand and support. Section 3.3 draws on the literature about children’s discourse development to explore the discourse skills that we might expect from child language learners. Section 3.6 presents ways in which classroom activity can support children’s discourse skills development in the foreign language. Examples of short language practice activities that can be developed from a single set of pictutes are given in section 3.7. After consideration of the relation between spoken and written language in the classroom, section 3.8 discusses the use of dialogues in the classroom and their relation to learning the spoken language. 36Learning the spoken language . 3.2 Discourse and discourse events The term ‘discourse’ is used in two ways in the literature. Firstly, discourse is contrasted with text to emphasise that it concerns use of the language. While ‘text’ means nothing more than a piece of language, if it is considered as ‘discourse’, we must include the context of use and the users of the text. A very simple example is a shopping list. If we consider the shopping list as a text, we have a list of items. If we consider the shopping list as discourse, then we have the text but we must also consider many other elements around the list: that it was written by a woman, who has a family and a house to look after, who was planning a trip to a supermarket, that the list was written on the back of an envelope, that it was intended to be used while walking around the supermarket (although in my case would be as likely to be left on the kitchen table and have to be remembered from the writing of it!). These use and user factors are part of any analysis of discourse, and help explain content and form. The second use of discourse is in contrast to sentence, when it refers to a piece of language longer than the sentence. The. sentence has traditionally been taken as a basic unit for grammatical analysis, broken down into clauses, phrases and then words. Once we move from sentences to paragraphs or to books, articles or other large units of text, we are in the world of discourse. When we think about spoken language, discourse in this sense refers to conversation or to larger units of talk, such as stories or songs. The first sense of discourse is, for me, the most important, because all language is used in a context and develops as a result of contextualised use. The second sense can be seen as springing out of the first, in that, when people use language for real purposes, they tend to do so in time: bounded chunks of talk or writing. These real units of language use are very seldom restricted to the length of a sentence or smaller — although they can be, as when a sign on the edge of a building site says Keep Off! or Danger. The term ‘discourse event’ will be used here to describe a naturally bounded use of language of any length. ‘Discourse’ in foreign language learning needs both senses. Discourse as real language use is the target of teaching: we want children to be able to use the foreign language with real people for real purposes. Part of this requires that children know how the foreign language works in conversations and longer stretches of talk and text. Furthermore, discourse occurs in language classrooms: when teachers and learners interact on tasks and activities, they are involved in a discourse event. 37Teaching Languages to Young Learners 3.3 Meaning first 3.3.1 Children’s drive to find meaning Piagetian and Vygotskyan theories of development, set out in Chapter x, see children as actively constructing meaning from their experiences in the world. Vygotsky emphasised the shared construction of meaning with other people, and Bruner’s notion of scaffolding develops this idea to show how adults can support children in the construction of under- standing. From early childhood, the desire to connect emotionally and communicate with other people seems to drive speaking. As children move through infancy, they begin to communicate with others about things in their shared world, and develop their vocabulary of labels . alongside their developing abilities to categorise (Locke 1993). Under- lying any social interaction, including scaffolding, is the human desire to make contact with other people, to cross the gap between their thoughts and one’s own. Even if, ultimately, we must acknowledge that we never have complete access to anyone else’s mind, we seem to be driven to keep trying. In this quest to connect with another’s thoughts, language is the primary tool we have. When we interact, we use words _ to try to capture our own and other people’s ‘sense’, our own particular contextualised understandings and connotations for events and ideas (Vygotsky 1962). For infants, language often seems to play a secondary role to the social and affective, and less attention is paid to the actual language content of talk than to its probable social meanings. Locke (1993) describes three year old English speakers who were happy to respond to an adult who spoke to them in Spanish that they did not understand. The children seemed to use the social context and intona- tion as guides to how to respond. Locke points out that we need to be aware that young children must inevitably have to operate with only partial understanding of much of the language that they hear every day, but that this does not stop them interacting. As they get older, so they build up knowledge of word meanings from a wider range of contexts, and language gradually becomes a more precise and effective tool for communication. The move in language use from partial to more complete understandings must also be experienced by foreign language learners. Donaldson’s work with children taking part in experimental tasks showed how they use their experience of intention and purpose in human activity to make sense of what they are required to do (Donaldson 1978). As human beings, we are driven by a need to ‘make sense’ of, and to, other people. In what has been described as ‘an innate drive for “coherence” (Meadows 1993:72), children cope with the 38Learning the spoken language continua! novelty of the world by seeking sense, bringing all they know * and have already experienced to work out a meaning in what someone says to them or in what they see happening. Research with autistic children adds further evidence to support the idea that children are normally driven to construct understanding; these children are not able to make coherent sense of these events but seem to see them as bewilderingly unconnected. The use of first language is driven by a socially-motivated search for understanding and a need to share under- standing. Let’s then imagine children, who we have described as actively trying to make sense of new situations and events, sitting in a foreign language classroom. The social and affective drive to share understanding will still operate (unless it is trained out of them, which can happen). When they encounter new language, we can expect that they will try to make sense of it by bringing their ‘social knowledge’, ie. what they know already about how the world works, how adults, in this case teachers, talk to children and what kinds of things those adults have previously wanted them to do. This knowledge and experience will help children find social purpose that can be used as a key to understanding. It will also help children understand the foreign language as a means of communication, as words and phrases are learnt to fit familiar contexts, such as greeting and naming. When children-are put in a situation where they want to share understanding with other people through the foreign language, they will search their previous languagé-using experi- ence for ways to act in the foreign language. If their language resources are not sufficient, then the social motivation to construct shared under- standing, what Skehan has called ‘communicative pressure’ (Skehan 1996), is likely to lead to use of first language or mixtures of Lz and the foreign language. This tendency towards communication at any cost affects learners of all ages. We discuss the implications of this further in Chapter 9. In the learning-centred approach to classroom activity adopted here, the human drive to find and share meaning is harnessed to support language use by being built into task demands. 3.3.2 Why teachers need to check that meaning is accessible Thave already (in section 2.x) briefly referred to the possible dangers if children cannot construct understanding in foreign language lessons. If adults find themselves in a situation where they cannot make sense of what they were told or asked to do, they will probably ask directly for clarification or find some other way to understand. Children are importantly different in this respect because it takes some years for them to become equal participants in interaction, and to see that each 39Teaching Languages to Young Learners participant has responsibility for making themselves understood to the other (Ricard x993; Meadows 1993; Anderson and Lynch 1988). Generally respecting and wanting to please their teachers, children may continue with activities even if they do not understand. They will continue to speak in the foreign language and continue to perform classroom activities, without understanding. And, if they are not under- standing, they cannot be learning. It is not unusual to see pupils in lessons ‘mouthing’ the sentences in the text book back to their teacher, appearing to complete an activity, but understanding, and learning, nothing. We will look at ways of evaluating children’s understanding in Chapter 10. Here though we should note the importance of teachers continually putting themselves in the child’s position and asking: Can the child find or construct meaning in this language / activity? It is crucial for teachers to take the responsibility for checking whether their pupils understand the language being used and the purpose of activities being carried out. 3.3.3 Meaning in speaking and listening Speaking and listening are both active uses of language, but differ in the mental activity involved and demands that they make on learners of language in terms of finding and sharing meaning. Listening can be seen as (primarily) the active use of language to access other people’s mean- ings, whereas speaking is the active use of language to express meanings so that other people can make sense of them. The labels ‘receptive’ and ‘productive’ uses of language can be applied to listening and speaking respectively. To construct understanding in a foreign language, learners will use their existing language resources, built up from previous experience of language use. In active listening, the goal of the mental work is to make sense, e.g. of a story or instructions, and is thus naturally meaning- focused rather than language-focused. For example, children listening to a story told in the foreign language from a book with pictures will understand and construct the gist, or outline meaning, of the story in their minds. Although the story may be told in the foreign language, the mental processing does not need to use the foreign language, and may be carried out in the first language or in some language-independent way, using what psychologists call ‘mentalese’. If we were to check what the children understood, we might find they could tell us the story in their first language, i.e. they could recall the meaning, and they might recall some words or phrases in the foreign language. It is very unlikely 40Learning the spoken language -that they would be able to re-tell the story in the foreign language, because their attention has not been focused on the words and syntax of the story but on its underlying meaning. Different types of listening activities are required to ensure a language-focus (Field 1998). To speak in the foreign language in order to share understandings with other people requires attention to precise details of the language. A speaker needs to find the most appropriate words and the correct grammar to convey meaning accurately and precisely, and needs to organise the discourse so that a listener will understand. When listening, the nuances of meaning carried by grammar or discourse organisation can often be constructed from other clues, but speaking doesn’t allow for this so easily. The demands of re-telling a story in the foreign language after listening and understanding should not be underesti- mated: the language needed at word, sentence and discourse levels must be found and produced. Speaking is much more demanding than listening on language learners’ language resources and skills. Speaking activities, because they are so demanding, require careful and plentiful support of various types, not just support for understanding, but also support for production. The terms ‘Input’ and ‘Output’ are often used to refer to listening and speaking {and reading and writing) respectively. This terminology reflects a computer model of the human brain that sees language used by other people as ‘information’, which is received as input, is mentally processed, and the results produced as output. The computer metaphor has been helpful, but is not adequate to describe listening and speaking in a foreign language because the key processes between input and output, that we have described as finding and sharing understanding, are down-graded in importance. For some time in the 1980s, it was suggested that ‘comprehensible input’, ie. listening to or reading English and making sense of it, was not just necessary for learning a language but would be enough on its own to drive language development (Krashen 1982). Research in immersion situations, however, showed the limits of this comprehen- sible input theory. Pupils in Canadian schools who learnt their school subjects through French as a second language received plenty of mean- ingful and comprehensible input. Evaluation of their language skills and resources showed that their listening comprehension skills were very good, but that their production often showed a lack of precision and grammatical accuracy. It was clear that, in addition to being exposed to large amounts of comprehensible input, learners need to use their production resources and skills, if they are to develop knowledge and skills to share their understandings fully and accurately (Swain 1985, 1995). 41Teaching Languages to Young Learners Cognitive differences between listening and speaking help us under- stand why the metaphor of input and output is inadequate for language learning. For a computer, input leads to output through invisible | processes. The metaphor directs attention away from the crucial learning processes which happen between input and output, both in the classroom and in learners’ minds, and from how these learning processes may be supported by teaching and tasks. Recent work on ‘input processing’ (Van Patten 1996) attempts to work with these in- between processes to help language development. We look in some detail at these ideas in Chapter 5. 3.3.4 Summary In this section, we have further developed the idea of discourse as meaningful use of language, and children as participants in the dis- course, searching out meaning and coherence in what they hear around them and in the contributions they make to the discourse. Discourse in the foreign language makes different demands on children from in their first language, and if they are to use their meaning-making capacities to help in Jariguage learning, the teacher must support them by making meaning accessible. The theoretical differences between understanding and participating in foreign language talk described in the last sub- section will be seen more clearly when we move to look at real discourse in the next section. 3.4 Analysis of a task-in-action We will now look at young language learners participating in discourse, and analyse how they use their foreign language to understand and to share meaning with their teacher. We will see how some succeed better than others in producing talk and participating in discourse. The class- room talk will later provide examples of several aspects of discourse skills. 3.4.1 The setting and the task The classroom discourse event was recorded in a small school in northern Norway. The headteacher of the school taught English, and in this Grade 4 class he had just seven pupils, who were around rx years old and had been learning English for a year. Although the school was in a tiny, isolated village, many pupils used English on their home computer games and all had television showing programmes in English, 42Learning the spoken language _ with Norwegian sub-titles; they were in these ways linked into a global English-speaking community. Their lessons usually followed the course book quite closely, and the class had just completed the reading of a dialogue about animals who live in the arctic areas of the far north and had discussed it a little. In the first extract from the talk, we see the teacher (T) setting out the-task-as-plan that he intends the pupils to complete: Note All transcribed talk will use the following symbols: {.)' micro pause #??2? indecipherable talk on tape {1.0} pause of approx. x second, etc. anzd extended syllable or phoneme ? rising intonation suggesting question teaching grammar: background §.4.1 Trends in teaching grammar Young learner classrooms are inevitably affected by the trends that sweep through foreign language teaching, as can be seen from the development of ‘task-based’ syllabuses in Malaysia, of the ‘target- oriented’ curriculum in Hong Kong, and of ‘communicative’ syllabuses in many other countries. Some of these trends turn out to be good for learners and learning; others are less clearly beneficial. Young learner contexts also start trends, but less frequently; Prabhu’s work on task- based learning in India in the 1970s was influential in early develop- ments in task-based language teaching, for example. Grammar teaching in recent years has been as susceptible as other aspects of FLT to trends, the most significant of which for our purposes has probably been the swing away from grammar-translation methods through communicative methods and on to current ideas about ‘fo- cusing on form’. Each of these perspectives on language teaching takes a different view of learning processes, and we can clarify what is important about each by examining practice through the lens of research on learning. 5.4.2 Teaching grammar as explicit rules: learning as building blocks Underlying traditional grammar-translation methodology, and other forms of grammar-centred language teaching, is the notion that the most important part of the language is its grammar, and that language learning is the accumulation of mastered rules of the grammar. Grammar rules are introduced one-by-one, explicitly, to the learners. Metalinguistic labels are used to talk explicitly about the grammar, e.g. ‘the past perfect tense’, and the terms and organisation needed to talk about language become another part of what has to be learnt. Learners are expected to learn the rules and to practise using the rules to construct sentences. After more practice, the assumption is that the rules get to be used automatically. To teach the language this way, the structures.or rules are sorted into a sequence, assumed to progress from ‘easy’ to ‘difficult’, and the sequence forms a syllabus. Some learners, particularly those who are academically successful, can do well using these methods and reach high levels of language proficiency. It is known from language testing, that students who do well on grammar tests often also do well on reading and writing tests, LO§Teaching Languages to Young Learners reinforcing the possibility of a link between more formal educational success and success via formal explicit grammar teaching. This in turn has implications for younger learners, who, as we have seen, are only beginning to get familiar with formal institutionalised ‘scientific’ con- cepts. The ways of thinking needed to cope with learning through explicit grammar rules are likely to be difficult for younger children. The building block sequencing also doés not fit very comfortably with younger children’s tendency for the thematic or narrative. We need a more organic metaphor for the growth of internal grammar, that does not see it as the piling up of discrete blocks of knowledge, but that captures the idea of non-linear and interconnected growth: grammar grows like a plant, perhaps, watered by meaningful language use, and pushing out new shoots while older stems are strengthened. As we will see, explicit teaching of grammar pattems can have a role even in this metaphor, but it is more like the occasional application of fertiliser at certain key points in the growing season. Even the youngest children are intrigued by the way their first language works and this curiosity is likely to be felt about the foreign language. Children notice patterns as they make sense of the world around them and it may be fruitful to make use of curiosity and pattern-noticing in foreign language learning. As we saw with the T Rex extract at the’ start of the chapter, talking about patrerns in language does not need complicated technical metalanguage. However, metalanguage is a useful tool in more advanced language learning, and can have a place in the language classroom. Young children are quite capable of learning terms like word, sentence, letter, moving on to learn about word classes and their labels (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions), about sentence construction (from seeing punctuation in written English) and early ideas about clauses as parts of sentences (e.g. a sentence with two clauses joined with and). Graded introduction of metalanguage across the primary years, if done meaningfully and through discourse contexts, can give children a solid foundation for later study of languages. We will return to this idea in section 5.6.5, and again in the next chapter, since working with the written language makes form visible and more easily talked about. 5.4.3 Communicative approaches: no grammar needed Being able to talk about the language is very different from being able to talk in the language, and it was a reaction to the lack of fluency and ease with the foreign language, experienced by many of those taught by grammar-translation, that led to the development of communicative language teaching (CLT) in the late 1970s and r98es. A central tenet of 106Learning grammar CLT was that learners would learn the language by using it to commu- " nicate with others. In its strongest form, the process of foreign language learning was supposed to resemble, child first language acquisition, where it all just happens without any direct or explicit teaching. It is questionable whether such a strong form of CLT was ever adopted in practice. More likely is that various weaker forms were taken up, with attempts to make language practice activities more realistic. What certainly happened to grammar teaching was a downgrading of its importance in foreign language classrooms. A form of CLT that is based entirely on listening to comprehensible input is Total Physical Response (IPR), and variations on TPR are found in many young learner coursebooks. In this method as developed by Asher (972), students listen to commands in the foreign language and respond only through movement and action e.g. getting up and sitting down, turning round, putting things on shelves. The difficulty of the input is gradually increased and eventually students take over the teacher's role and give commands in the foreign language. In its manifestations in children’s foreign language learning, TPR can involve listening and doing actions with a song or responding to:commands. It is claimed that learners develop skills in listening and in speaking through TPR, and it has been shown to be particularly appropriate for beginners (Lightbown and Spada 1999). Along with other ‘no grammar’ approaches, however, there seem to be limits to what can be achieved without some-attention to output and to grammar. 5.4.4 Focus on form: the revival of grammar teaching One of the most important sites of language learning theory and research from the 1970s on has been the immersion programs in North America, in which, for example, French-speaking Canadian children might attend an English-medium school, or a Spanish-medium school in a US city might take in children using many different first languages, including Spanish. It was in this context thar Krashen and colleagues set out the theory that second language learning could follow the same route as first language acquisition (Dulay, Burt and Krashen 1982), and immersion classes formed a huge experiment in learning through communicating in the foreign language. Recent evaluations of immer- sion programs show mixed results as to their success (Harley and Swain 1984; Harley et al. 1995). Children do pick up the foreign language quickly and develop very good accents and listening skills. They can achieve good results through the second language. But in terms of grammar, children taught through the second language do not develop the same levels of accuracy as native speakers and, without this 107Teaching Languages to Young Learners attention to the form of the language, problems with basic structures continue (Lightbown and Spada 1994). In subject classrooms, where communicating meaning is the central aim, learners seem to bypass aspects of grammar, both in listening, where.more attention is paid to the subject content than to the language that carries it, and in speaking, where teachers are able to understand what pupils want to say. Furthermore, if all pupils in a class are second language learners, the language that they use with each other can contain and reinforce inaccuracies in grammar. . What we are seeing now is that communicating through a language and learning a language can actually conflict with each other, and that focusing on meaning in classrooms does not automatically, as. was assumed with CLT, guarantee continuing language development on all - fronts. A similar point is emerging from work in task-based language teaching: if a task creates pressure to communicate, learners may respond with inaccurate use of language or with first language (Skehan 1996). Grammar may emerge naturally in first language, it may even be genetically determined (Pinker 1994), but the grammar of a foreign language is ‘foreign’, and grammar development requires skilled plan- ning of tasks and lessons, and explicit teaching. From the learners’ point of view, it is increasingly recognised that attention to form is vital (Doughty and Williams 1998), and that learners need to be helped to notice the grammatical patterns of the foreign language, before they can make those patterns part of their internal grammar (Schmidt 1990; Van Patten 1996). Van Patten suggests (for older learners) that instruction should include explicit suggestions for what to look for in an FL pattern and ‘structure input’ activities in which learners do not try to produce new forms but are required to manipulate language information in some way. Not only are noticing and attention needed in input, but, in output too, learners need to be helped to focus on the accuracy and precision of their language use (Swain 1985, 1995). The potential of collaborative work in pairs and groups for grammar work is also being increasingly recognised (Kowal and Swain 1994; Fotos and Ellis 1991). Batstone (1995) helpfully brings some of these ideas together in a suggested sequencing of grammar learning activities around particular patterns or structures: (re) noticing J (re) structuring 1 proceduralizing 108Learning grammar ‘Noticing is, as we have seen, an active process in which learners become aware of the structure, notice connections between form and meaning, but do not themselves manipulate language. Successful noticing activities will usually: © support meaning as well as form; @ present the form in isolation, as well as in a discourse and linguistic context; contrast the form with other, already known, forms; ® require active participation by the learner; @ be ata level of detail appropriate to the learners ~ a series of noticing activities may ‘zoom in’ on details; © lead into, but not include, activities that manipulate language. Structuring involves bringing the new grammar pattern into the lear- ner’s internal grammar and, if necessary, reorganising the internal grammar (in processes like accommodation and assimilation; see Chapter 1). Batstone suggests that structuring usually requires con- trolled practicé around form and meanings, and the learner must be actively involved in constructing language to convey precise meaning, thus perhaps prompting further noticing at a more detailed level. In structuring activities: learners should manipulate the language, changing form in order to express meaning; e learners can be given choices in content that require adjustments in grammar to express meaning; there will be limited impact on spontaneous use ~ most of the results of structuring work are still internal. Proceduralisation is the stage of making the new grammar ready for instant and fluent use in communication, and requires practice in choosing and using the form to express meaning. In line with our awareness of the possible conflict between communicative pressure and accuracy, tasks used for proceduralisation must require attention to grammar as well as effective communication. By gradually adjusting task pressures, by decreasing the time allowed, for example, as the grammar forms are becoming automatised, teachers can help push proceduralisation forwards. The most recent trends in language teaching remind us that grammar is needed, but we have also learnt from CLT and immersion programs that meaning-focused, communicative classroom activities do increase fluency in language use, and that there are interesting and meaningful ways to help Jearners with grammar. The final part of the chapter will consider how new, and not so new, ideas about grammar learning can be 109Teaching Languages to Young Learners adapted for young learners, including noticing ~ structuring — procedur- alising. Before that, the next section summarises the chapter so far. 5.5 Principles for learning-centred grammar teaching Young learners need to be surrounded by and participate in meaningful discourse in the foreign language, and it would not be conceptually appropriate for grammar to be explicitly taught as formal, explicit rules in young learner classrooms to childreri under the age of 8 or 9 years. However, I suggest it is important for teachers to have an awareness of grammar issues, and to have a range of form-focusing techniques, so that they can take advantage of learning opportunities that arise when learners need grammar to take their language learning forwards and can bring grammatical features of stories, dialogues, songs, efc. to the attention of even the youngest children in non-formal ways. As children get older, so they are increasingly able to learn from more formal instruction, but we should remember that grammar teaching can often destroy motivation and puzzle children rather than enlighten them. Good learning-centred grammar teaching will be meaningful and inter- esting, require active participation from leamers, and will work with how children learn and what they are capable of learning. As with all other aspects of learning and teaching, the socio-cultural context of foreign language lessons will strongly influence what actually happens. in classrooms, but some general principles for learning-centred grammar teaching can be summarised: The need for grammar - grammatical accuracy and precision matter for meaning; ~ without attention to form, form will not be learnt accurately; ~ form-focused instruction is particularly relevant for those features of the foreign language grammar that are different from the first language or are not very noticeable. . Potential conflict between meaning and grammar ~ if learners’ attention is directed to expressing meaning, they may neglect attention to accuracy and precision. Importance of attention in the leaming process — teaching can help earners notice and attend to features of grammar in the language they hear and read, or speak and write; roLearning grammar * noticing an aspect of form is the first stage of learning it; it then needs to become part of the learner’s internal grammar, and to become part of the learner’s language resources ready for use in a range of situations. Leaming grammar as the development of intemal grammar — the learner has to do the learning; just teaching grammar does not make it happen; ~ grammar learning can work outwards from participation in dis- course, from vocabulary and from learnt chunks; - learners’ errors can give teachers useful information about their learning processes and their internal grammars. . The role of explicit teaching of grammar rules - teaching grammar explicitly requires the leamer to think about language in very abstract, formal ways that some enjoy and some find difficult. The younger the learner, the less appropriate’‘it is likely to be; ~ children can master metalanguage if it is well taught; metalanguage can be a useful tool. 5.6 Teaching techniques for supporting grammar learning In this section, we move to practicalities and consider how teachers may actually go about helping young learners develop their grammatical knowledge in the foreign language. We begin with seeing how common activities in the young learner classroom can offer opportunities for grammar learning. The middle three sub-sections take noticing, struc- turing and proceduralising, and present some examples of what young learner versions of such activities might look like. Finally, we turn to the issue of how to develop children’s grasp of ‘metalanguage’. 5.6.1 Working from discourse to grammar -Many types of discourse that occur in young learner classrooms have grammatical patterns that occur naturally, but that can be exploited for grammar learning. It requires teachers to think about their language use from a grammatical perspective, so that they become aware of opportunities for grammar that arise every day. Classroom discourse contexts and routines (see Chapter x) can serve to introduce new (IITeaching Languages to Young Learners grammar, with access to meaning supported by action and objects, or to give further practice in language that has already been introduced in other ways. Routines are an ideal context in which chunks can-be expanded. . The language of classroom management When children begin learning English, some very simple phrases for classroom management can be introduced, and as time goes by, these can be expanded. Some of the phrases originally used by the teacher can be used by pupils when they work in pairs or groups. The language of ~ classroom management can thus act as a meaningful discourse context within which certain patterns arise regularly and help with building the internal grammar. When organising practical activities, for example, the teacher may ask children to: give out the scissors the books the paper the pencils The range of verbs to use with the nouns can be gradually increased: give out the scissors collect the books tidy the paper find the pencils put away The noun phrases can be expanded to match or to extend grammar development: give out the small scissors collect the green writing books tidy the paper from the cupboard find the red pencils that are on my desk put away Talking with children As with the T Rex example where we started, conversations with individual children can be very powerful for language development, because they can pick up on exactly what an individual child needs to know next to talk about what interests him or her, the ‘space for TizLearning grammar growth’ as it was called in Chapter x. Ifa child volunteers something, in the first language or in what they can manage of the foreign language, the teacher can respond in the foreign language, offering a fuller or more correct way of saying it: Child: my mummy hospital Teacher: oh! your mummy’s in hospital. Why? This type of ‘corrective feedback’ can also be used for expanding the talk. If a child offers a comment about a picture, for example, the teacher can respond with fuller sentences that pick up the child’s interest: Child: bird tree Teacher: Yes. The bird’s in the tree, He’s sitting on the branch. He’s singing. Talk with children as a class can also offer incidental focusing on form. Although grammar may not be the central language learning goal of a task, it can be part of what is talked about, as in this example where a Norwegian teacher is working with the children we saw earlier in the chapter. This time, they are correcting a true / false reading exercise, but the teacher takes the chance to do some work on make — made ~ made up. Notice how she helps ensure children understand the meaning, as well as the form, by contrasting made up with read. > pretend yes ( . ) or make (2.0) do you remember? they made yes (.) they made UP stories ( . ) didn’t they? they didn’t read the stories do you agree? day In another part of the same exercise, the teacher helps out a child who needs to find the opposite of much bigger than. Notice how the child tries to express the idea in line 5, and then how the teacher, in lines 7 and 8 offers alternative grammatical ways of expressing the same idea: T: sentence ten (1.0) Christina P: (reads) the strangest thing of all (. ) was that Joe was much bigger than the toy soldier ( . } that’s false T: why? . P: because she (.) er (.) she was not bigger,(.) mat (.) much bigger than the toy soldier T: yes (.) that’s right ( . ) she was not bigger than the toy soldier ON AWA wW PH 113Teaching Languages to Young Learners 9 she was just as big as ( . ) this soldier 10 so she was quite small ( . ) wasn’t she? II Pz yes By becoming ‘grammar-aware’, it is possible to incorporate a lot of grammar teaching through this kind of incidental focusing on form that seizes on opportunities and operates in a child’s space for growth. ~s! 5.6.2 Guided hoticing activities Activities in thé-previdus section are those likely to lead to noticing of grammatical patterns in the language. It is possible to construct activities that make noticing even more probable, and which fit all or most of the criteria for good noticing activities listed in sections.4.4- Listen and notice Pupils listen to sentences or to a connected piece of talk, e.g. a story or phone call, and complete a table or grid using what they hear. In order to complete the grid, they need to pay attention to the grammar aspect being taught. Halliwell (1992) suggests using a grid to practise preposi- tions (Figure 5.1). It is important that the top line includes at least two instances of each object with a different location, so that pupils have to listen to the preposition in the sentences to know which box to tick: e.g. the cup is on the chair / the cup is under the chair. Presentation of new language with puppets In language syllabuses that require teachers to present new language regularly to children, the idea of learner-noticing can be helpfully introduced into more traditional ways of teaching grammar. When introducing a new pattern, the teacher can construct a dialogue with a story-line, that uses a ‘repetition plus contrast’ pattern, to be played out by puppets. In one such story I have used (for children of 8-zo years}, a crocodile (Croc) and a squirrel discuss going swimming; dramatic irony is added because the children know that Croc really wants a chance to eat Squirrel. The dialogue uses repetition and contrast to highlight how English expresses the idea of a regular routine event using the simple present tense. The meaning is supported by a picture on the board of Squirrel’s house in a tree by the river, in which Croc swims, and a large calendar showing the days of the month with pictures of house cleaning in each Monday slot, grand- Im4Learning grammar [activity 2 ~ | Listening grid . eee Here is another activity suitable for your ‘core’. It too is intended to provide active response to new language. For this activity, the children have to mark on a matrix or grid the information read out by the teacher. The example below is practising prepositions. The teacher has so far read out: “The cup is on the table.’ “The cat is under the chair.’ ‘The girl is in front of the tree.” on cr Figure 5.1 Listening grid (from Halliwell 2992, p. 44, © Pearson Longman) mother in each Tuesday, and so on. The children listen several times to the story-dialogue: s: I wish I could swim like you, Croc. e: I'll teach you to swim. s: Oh, will you? Cc: Let’s start next week. Shall we go swimming on Monday? s: No, sorry. On Mondays, J clean my house. c: Shall we go swimming on Tuesday? s: No, sorry. On Tuesdays, I visit my grandmother, Similar pattern for Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays. c: ((wearily)) What about Sunday? s: Yes! On Sundays, I’m free. ¢: ((more excited; licking his lips)} OK. On Sunday we'll have our first swimming lesson! EISTeaching Languages to Young Learners The teacher can then recap the routine events by pointing to the calendar and saying the key patrern phrases on their own: ‘On Tues- days, I visit my grandmother etc. To help input processing, pupils may be given a blank calendar and be asked to complete Croc’s regular routine from listening, making a distinction between routine events, ‘On Mondays, I catch fish’ and, non-routine events ‘On Sunday, I’m going to teach Squirrel to swim’. 6.6.3 Language practice activities that offer tructurit opportunities oe In structuring activities the goal is to help learners internalise the grammatical pattern so that it becomes part of their internal grammar. The focus is on internal work that happens as a result of activities that demand accuracy, rather than on fluency in production. ‘Various types of classroom tasks can be used with grammar structuring goals. Some manipulation and pre-planning by the teacher may be needed to ensure that the activities include plentiful practice of the particular form. Questionnaires, surveys and quizzes . These are commonly found in young learner course books; after input on favourite foods, for example, children are asked to interview their friends to find out their favourite foods. The teacher needs to plan which language forms the pupils will be encouraged to use. Preparation and rehearsal of the questions is necessary to ensure accuracy, and the activity must be managed so that the questions are asked in full each time. The language use in a questionnaire activity can easily become reduced to something like cakes? sweets? pizza? Pretending to carry out the survey by phone, rather than face-to-face, would provide a realistic reason to require the full question, Do you like pizza? or Which do you prefer, pizza or cake? to be asked each time. Once the information from several people has been collected, group work on compiling results can offer further opportunities for mterna- lising or structuring the grammar patterns, but only if tightly organised. Remember that structuring requires learners to manipulate the language so that they produce the form with attention and accurately. The original question Do you like ...? might have been produced as a chunk, whereas at this stage, the task can require the chunk to be broken down and re-used, as each child reports his or her individual results: six people like pizza, and two people like cakes. The numbers can be placed in previously prepared charts and added up. They can then be put on a graph that shows favourite foods, and a spoken report X16Learning grammar ‘prepared, and then presented with the graph to the rest of the class. Again, the spoken report should be full and accurate, so that attention has to be paid to word form and word order. It should be practised by the group, and corrected by the teacher during the rehearsal stage so that accurate forms are said aloud in the final presentation. Information gap activities Activities with information gaps are often found in course books to practise oral skills. Again, with just small adjustments, they can be used with grammar goals rather than oral fluency goals. A task that moves on from the Croc and Squirrel story but practises the same grammatical form through an information gap might use calendars. Children work in pairs; each has a calendar covering the same month, but with different entries (this is the ‘gap’). Without looking, again perhaps pretending to talk by phone, the children are to find a time when they are both free, and can then decide what they want to do, e.g. go swimming, go to the cinema, go shopping. In finding out when they are both free, they should be encouraged to use the language form being practised, e.g. Shall we meet om Friday? No, sorry. On Fridays, I go to the library. : Helping hands This is a nice practice activity that I came across in a Maltese classroom, and which offers opportunities for structuring the simple present for routines. The topic was helping in the house, and the children, aged 5 or 6 years as I recall, had drawn round their hands and cut out the hand shape (if this is too demanding on motor skills, the teacher can prepare cut out hand shapes in advance). On each’ finger they wrote one sentence describing somethitig they do to help at home: I wash the dishes. I play with my baby sister. Each child’s sentences could be different. The paper cut-outs were then displayed on the wall, making a kind of palm tree . out of the hand shapes. It looked very’effective, but was also interesting for the children to read, to see what their friends did at home. : Drills and chants Drills have been used in language classrooms for decades, and are a useful way of giving all children some speaking practice when the class is too large for individual speaking. They also offer language and involvement support to children when used to practise new language, because the child can listen to others to pick up bits that she or he is 117Teaching Languages to Young Learners unsure about, and drills can be lively and fun if the pace is kept up. The dangers of over-using drills occur mostly if the children do not under- stand the content, and drills are then a mechanical exercise in making a noise, rather than language learning opportunities. I shall take it for granted here that the meaning of the language being drilled is supported and made clear to children in appropriate ways. We can then ask whether drills can help in grammar learning. Repetition drills, in which the children repeat what the teacher says, can help in familiarising a new form, but substitution drills are the ones that offer more for grammar structuring. In a substitution drill, the learners may transform the teacher’s line, as here from you want to to let's: . tT: You want to play football. Ps:* Let’s play football. T: You want to go swimming. ps: Let’s go swimming. (Doff 1988) Alternatively, the teacher may use single words or pictures as prompts for pupils to produce a sentence: T: Cinema. ps: Let’s go to the cinema. x: Football. Ps: Let’s play football. ({Doff 1988} In each case, the pupils are doing grammatical work in their minds to produce their line in the drill, and this may help structuring. 5.6. 4 Proceduralising activities At this point, we want leamers to automatise their use of the gramma- tical form so that it is available quickly and effectively for use in communication. Task design must ensure that grammar is essential for achieving task goals and that some attention to accuracy is required, but the idea is that attention to accuracy can gradually be relaxed as it becomes automatic. Poiar animal description re-visited Ir will be helpful to recall what happened to the polar animal descrip- tion task in Chapter 3. We looked at speaking activities on this theme in section 3.8, but here we can think about the task possibilities from a grammatical point of view.” 1x8Learning grammar ‘We can see now that doing a description does need some grammatical knowledge that has already entered the internal grammar through ‘noticing’ and ‘structuring’. The production of a description to the whole class might then be a useful proceduralising activity for those items of grammar. Because it is a public performance, it will justify attention to getting forms exactly right through rehearsing and perhaps writing down a text. The pupils could choose their animal, so that they will have to select and adapt the grammatical forms for their own particular choices. The presentation might be repeated several times: to another class, to parents, on tape for another school, and each repetition moves the child towards greater fluency with the new forms. A similar effect might be had by repeating the task, but describing a bird rather than an animal, or a tropical animal rather than a polar animal; there is practice in using the grammatical patterns, with attention to accuracy but with increasing automaticity leading to increasing fluency as well. Dictogloss This is a generic activity that offers many possibilities for young learner classroom’s (as well as for older and adult learners) once reading and writing are established. Wajaryb (x990) describes various activities that pick up some of the learning opportunities of traditional dictation in more meaningful ways. Dictogloss is one of these. It was used by Kowal and Swain (1994) to investigate how well 13- and 14-year-old learners could reflect on their accuracy in language use, notice gaps in what they knew, and get help from their peers to develop their grammar, Although the study was carried out with slightly older learners, 1 would suggest that the idea can be adapted for young learners, perhaps as young as 7 or 8 years old. , The basic idea of Dictogloss is that the teacher reads out a text several times, the pupils listen and make notes between readings, and then reconstruct the text in pairs or small groups, aiming to be as close as possible to the original and as accurate as possible. During the collaborative reconstruction, learners will talk to each other about the language, as well as the content, drawing on and making their internal grammatical knowledge. Through this talk, a pupil may learn from another about some aspect of grammar In Vygotskyan terms, if the text is carefully chosen, learners will be working in their zones of potential development and their peers may scaffold learning in the ZPD. The length of the text and the difficulty of its content and language can all be adjusted to learners’ needs, as can the amount and type of support given through key words written on the board, a skeleton frame for the text given, grouping pupils in mixed ability, and so on. We can 119Teaching Languages to Young Learners imagine that a dictogloss around a description of an animal would be a helpful activity at some stage in the Polar Animal task, either as a follow up to listening to descriptions, or as a preparation to producing a group description. Younger children might be given the words of a rhyme or chant on little cards. Their reconstruction task would be to put the cards in the correct order. This would probably lead to them repeating the rhyme many times over as they try to work out the order. They would need to pay attention to the form of words and the word order to complete the task, so that accuracy would be required at a level above spelling. 5.6.5 introducing metalanguage Explicit teacher talk Here is a teacher doing some metalinguistic work with rx-year-old pupils on plural forms in English. Notice how he uses the repetition + contrast pattern, and how he formulates the ‘rule’ at the end, after the specific example: t: if we have many of them..two of them? P: cows -T: horse? Pp: horses (some more examples of regular forms) sheep? : sheep : yes (.) we don’t put the s at the end of sheep wolf? wolves. : how do we write it? yes? 2 W0.LES : you should (z.0) one should think so (.) but (.) it isn’t $0 (2.0) yes? , P: W..O..L..V.E..S T: yes (1.0) yes (1.0) it’s a special word (2.0) one wolf (.) with F two wolves (.) with V Ato wee dws ‘We can see that it is both useful and quite possible to talk about language without using technical terms. However, since these children seem to have the concept of plural and singular, the technical terms might be usefully introduced to them. This will also depend on whether they have learnt metalanguage terms in their first language lessons. ° 120Learning grarnmar ‘Cloze activities for word class A new rhyme, song or poem could give a discourse context to focus on word classes through a simple cloze activity. The song, say, is written out with gaps; in one version, all the nouns are omitted, in another, all the verbs, and in a third, all the pronouns. The pupils would hear and sing the song a few times and then would be divided into three groups, each given one of the three cloze versions: the song ‘This is the way we wash our hands’ would look like this: (z) (2) (3) Thisis the___ This __ the way This is the way ‘We wash our __ We _ourhands __ wash __ hands Wash our _____our hands Wash ___ hands Wash our ___ ___our hands Wash ____ hands Thisisthe This ___ the way This is the way We wash our __ We____ our hands _. wash __ hands Early in the__ Early inthe morning Early in the morning In groups; the learners would work together to fill the gaps. They can be told what is missing from their versions. After they have had a good try at completing the gaps, the groups are re-divided into threes, with one person from each of the previous noun, verb and pronoun groups working together. They then compare versions to complete one full version. This kind of activity focuses attention on word classes and how they contribute to discourse, without going into any heavy grammat. | It is more challenging with a less predictable content! 5.7 Summary Developing the grammar of a foreign language is a long and compli- cated process; luckily, young learners have a long time ahead of them with the language. There is no need to rush into technical rules and labels that will confuse. For their ultimate success, it seems likely to be far better to give children a sound basis in using the language, while encouraging curiosiry and talk about patterns and contrasts in and between languages, and introducing grammatical metalanguage slowly and meaningfully. In this chapter, I have suggested that grammar does have a place in young learner classrooms. But the teacher of young learners can probably best help to develop children’s grammar in the foreign ‘21Teaching Languages to Young Learners language, not by teaching grammar directly, but by being sensitive to opportunities for grammar learning that arise in the classroom. A grammar-sensitive teacher will see the language patterns that occur.in tasks, stories, songs, rhymes and classroom talk, and will have a range of techniques to bring these patterns to the children’s notice, and to organise meaningful practice. To do this well requires considerable knowledge and teaching skills! 122.6 Learning literacy skills 6.1 Introduction As with previous areas in the young learner classroom, literacy learning needs informed and skilled teaching, and this chapter aims to provide background information to issues in early literacy, and to suggest principles and strategies for classroom teaching based on our current understandings of how children learn to read and write. The reader should be warned in advance that second language literacy is a complicated area and, as far as young learners are concerned, there is much that remains unknown. In the absence of relevant research findings, we will often need to rely on clear thinking and carefully monitored practice as guides in the classroom. It is important to begin with, and to keep returning to, the idea of reading and writing as language use for expressing and sharing mean- ings between people. Literacy in this sense is both social and cognitive. Socially, literacy provides people with opportunities to share meanings across space and time, Cognitively, literacy requires that individuals use specific skills and knowledge about how the written language operates in processing text. The chapter is written in the midst of heated discussion and changes over the teaching of reading and writing in British schools, and also in a time of changing conceptions of reading processes in foreign language teaching. The two sets of changes are not unconnected, and both reflect a realisation that the cognitive and language processes of literacy operate with knowledge and skills at many different levels, and that every level matters. Amongst other things, readers and writers need to recognise individual letters, know how syllables make up words, use information from the whole text and the context. What makes for successful literacy is the integration of information from each of these processes in the larger process of making sense of written text. Foreign language reading debates since the mid-r980s have been dominated by ‘top-down’ approaches, that emphasise making meaning over the lower level skills of word recognition or knowing letter-sound links (Koda 1994). At primary or elementary school level, a similar opposition between top-down and bottom-up approaches has been created, between ‘whole language’ approaches and ‘phonics’ teaching (Beard 123Teaching Languages to Young Learners” 1993; Hudelson 1994). We can now see that such oppositions aré artificial, and do a disservice to learners, who need it all. The discussions of literacy skills in this chapter will focus on English as a foreign language, partly because more research is available for English than for other languages, but mainly because the discussions need to be about a particular language in order not to disappear into abstractions. We begin by identifying the skills needed to be literate in English, and then proceed to review research findings on learning to read in a foreign language, identifying factors that may impact on young learners of English as a foreign language. The second part of the chapter takes the background theory and research into the classroom, suggesting principles and techniques for teaching literacy skills: at different ages and stages. . 6.2 Literacy skills in English In this section, the first / foreign language distinction is backgrounded, in order to describe first what is involved in becoming a skilled reader and writer in English. Section 6.3 will then address how literacy skills are developed in English as a foreign language. 6.2.1 Literacies and literacy skills Literacy skills include being able to read and write different sorts of texts for different purposes. In most societies today, literacy is part and parcel of everyday life for children and adults, and life is full of different sorts of written texts: in the home, on the street, on television, and on computers. In societies where widespread literacy is more recent, . schools may still make more use of written texts than homes, but information technology will probably bring rapid changes in the next few years. Literacy skills are then, not just an additional set, of skills learnt in schools, but an integral part of people’s lives. From their early infancy, children are involved in using writing and reading: for example, when they are helped to write their name on a birthday card to a friend or when they look at story books with adults. An activity, such as story-book reading or sending birthday cards, in which reading and writing is involved can be described as a ‘literacy event’ (Barton 1994). People in their daily lives are regularly involved in a range of literacy events, in which they use skills that extend beyond writing and reading text. Participation in literacy events at home provides children with their first experiences of written language. If we take the wider view, that we each learn multiple literacies (Street 1996), 124Learning literacy skills -we can see that becoming literate begins long before a child goes to school, and that the school has a foundation of literacy events and experiences upon which to build the narrower and more detailed skills of reading and writing. Within the broader idea of literacies lies the narrower, and perhaps more traditional, view of literacy as reading and writing words and texts. While applauding the broadening of our thinking about literacy, especially for the way these new ideas expand our views of what children already know and are capable of, I remain convinced that learning the detail of how texts are written and can be understood is crucial to children’s educational and personal development, and can be helped by good teaching. 6.2.2 Reading as dependent on visual, phonological and semantic information Embedded in both the broader and narrower concepts of literacy is the idea that reading and writing are essentially about understanding: that readers will understand texts that they read by constructing a meaning for themselves, and that writers will try to ensure that their readers are able to understand what they write. Although reading for understanding is more than saying what is written down, on the way to understanding, reading does link to speaking, as written words are ‘decoded’ into spoken words. When skilled readers make sense of written text, they may appear to bypass turning text into talk and go straight to under- standing. However, we know from recent empirical work that skilled readers do actually process every letter of words on the page; they just do it very quickly (Stanovich 1980, 1988; Oakhill and Garnham 1988). Fluent readers still have available the skill to speak the words of the text to themselves, the ‘voice in the head’ (Reid rggo: 91), and use it for difficult texts or texts that need special attention, such as poetry. Similarly, writing may involve turning spoken language into written words, but it also involves more than that. Reading brings together visual information from written symbols, phonological information from the sounds those symbols make when spoken, and semantic information from the conventional meanings associated with the words as sounds and symbols (see Figure 6.1). All three types of information are used by fluent readers in reaching an understanding of the text, together with information about the social uses of the text as discourse. In addition, skilled writing requires mastery of the fine motor skills to form the written shapes and orthographic knowledge of how written symbols are combined to represent words through spelling conventions. 125Teaching Languages to Young Learners phonological visual | aw “ information sounds : symbols discourse : : context : : : spoken t written words words “ semantic . information ceeeeee concepts Figure 6.2 The integration of information in reading a text 6.2.3 The unnatural demands of literacy Some of the most exciting developments in early literacy in the last few years have been around ‘emergent’ literacy and ‘whole language’. These focus on how children work out for themselves the secrets of reading and writing from participating in literacy events. We will examine the implications for the foreign language classroom later, but in this section 1 want to explore why it is that many children do nor develop literacy skills in natural and painless ways, but struggle to learn to read in their first language. It is important to remember that most children will need skilled teaching to help them become literate (Reid 1990; Oakhill and Beard 1999). Some of the reasons for reading problems originate in the historical construction of literacy and the demands, that are then placed on individual learners. Vygotsky (1978) describes the written language as ‘second-order’ meaning representation, to capture the idea of two stages between talk and written text in the development of literacy in societies. Spoken language was used first to represent mental ideas and meanings; in a socio-historical second step, written language was developed to represent talk. Different societies have produced different ways of writing down talk: English uses an alphabetic system, as does Arabic, but with a different direction; Japanese uses a syllabic system, with the syllable as unit, and a logographic system, in which symbols represent meanings directly. As the written form of a language develops, often 126Learning literacy skills over centuries, as a tool for representing the spoken language, conven- tions and rules emerge in the use of written forms that then have to be learnt anew by each successive generation of children. In the case of English, some spelling conventions date back to the x6th and 17th centuries, others were imposed in the nineteenth century and, because spelling has been fixed while’ pronunciation has changed, many of the conventions or rules of the written language do not match how English is spoken today (Stubbs 1980). To a modern child, the spelling of English does not offer a ‘natural’ match between written and spoken forms. . Similarly, certain specific text forms, or ‘genres’, have evolved over time within literate societies, with particular discourse patterns and organisations of texts becoming conventionalised. Genre theorists have argued that being able to use and understand a range of genres is an important educational goal that will empower children for adult life (Richardson 1998). A second way in which written language is often much less natural than spoken language for children is in its social context of use. Spoken language is used in contexts that offer much support for meaning, often from familiar and helpful adults who know the child and interact with him or her regularly (see Chapter 1). A child faced with a written text has support only from previous knowledge, from what the writer can build in, or through pictures or diagrams that illustrate the text. The writer is much more distant from a reader than is the case with speaking, and this distance can place a high demand on a reader to construct an understanding of the text (Reid 1999}. Although recent developments in literacy have encouraged a focus on the natural and meaningful involvement of children in literacy events at home and in their communities, we should not forget these non-natural facets of literacy. The discussion in this section suggests two ways in which teaching can support children in mastering the demands of literacy. Firstly, English spelling conventions and the text organisation in some genres are far from obvious and so can benefit from direct teaching. Secondly, in the early stages of school literacy, children will need support as they move from the very contextualised use of spoken language to using the more isolated, or ‘disembedded’, information in written texts. 6.2.4 How skilled readers operate In making meaning from a text, skilled readers use a combination of visual, phonological and semantic information, taken from the letters, words and sentences of the text. Readers build up an understanding of the text as they go along, sometimes called a ‘text base’ (van Dijk and 127Teaching Languages to Young Learners sentence / clause words + lervers / sounds Figure 6.2 The analogy of reading a text as seeing the earth by satellite at different scales Kintsch 1983; Kintsch 1988). The text base is a kind of dynamic and temporary meaning for the text, that draws on information processed at different scales. We can think of a reader working with a written text as like a satellite searching information about a landscape, and zooming in to different levels of scale to get information of different types at different scales. Pictures of the earth from space show it as a mainly blue sphere with continental masses set in oceans, while, at a much larger scale, British railways use satellite pictures to identify dangerous piles of autumn leaves that have fallen on railway tracks. To really understand the Earth, information is needed from all scales, from the leaf to continental masses; to really understand a text, information has to be integrated from the various scales at which a text can be ‘read’, from individual letters to discourse organisation. The various scales of reading a text are set out in Figure 6.2, in analogy with the satellite view of the Earth, and are then described in turn. The knowledge and skills used to extract information at the various text levels will be summarised in Figure 6.3. Context Context is used here to refer to any sources of information that are not inside the text but come from the reader’s world. Adult readers usually choose their own texts and have good reasons for wanting to read them. For example, you may pick up a newspaper to get an idea of what is going on in the world, or you may buy a book on gardening iri order to decide what to grow and where to plant it. Adults come to such texts with previous knowledge of using books and of the topic that will help make sense of what they read. Children on the other hand are often told what to read by adults, rather than choosing their own texts. Often children’s previous knowledge is incomplete or inaccurate, and they rely on texts to supply knowledge. Children’s reading is thus often much more demanding than it is for adults: if we did not know that the earth has oceans and continents, it would be much more difficult to under- stand the broad scale picture that is sent back from space. 128Learning literacy skills * Text Skilled readers approack texts, not only with purposes for reading, but with expectations about how the texts will be organised. From previous experience with gardening books, for example, they may go straight to the index to find relevant sections, and will use the pictures and diagrams to supplement information from the written text. Skilled readers’ knowledge of discourse organisation helps know where impor- tant information will be found, and they can thus direct their attention efficiently, focusing in on key passages and skipping more lightly over passages with less important information. From their early experience, children are likely to be familiar with story or narrative structure (section 3.6.3) but to be less familiar with other types of text. Knowledge of discourse organisation in written texts develops through experience with them, and may also be devel- oped explicitly through study skills activities. Until such knowledge is developed, children have a more difficult task than skilled readers and must work equally hard on all parts of a text to find out the useful information. Paragraph The paragraph is a discourse unit that is mainly used to deal with the development of topics in a text. Very often a paragraph contains within it, often right at the beginning, a ‘topic sentence’, which gives an overview of the whole paragraph (this paragraph began with one). From the topic sentence, the paragraph can move into more specific detail, through exemplification, expansion or explanation of the topic. Skilled readers will automatically recognise topic sentences and make mental links between its more general content and the more specific information in other sentences. Children do not learn about paragraphs from their experience with spoken language. Many of the early texts they encounter will not be long enough to use paragraphing organisation. As their writing de- velops, so the need to use paragraphs will arise and links can be made with reading texts, to learn the conventions of paragraph patterns in English. Sentence / clause At this level in our metaphor, we are at a scale comparable to seeing man-made features on the physical landscape. We recognise the Great Wall of China, or a motorway network, on a satellite picture because 129Teaching Languages to Young Learners we can mentally map their aerial shape on to our more close-up experience of them through pictures or real life encounters. In understanding sentences and clauses, skilled readers draw on their ‘close-up’ grammatical knowledge of how words are connected to produce meanings. Groups of words with a sentence that belong together are automatically recognised as units and processed together, 0.g. once upon a time. Children, even in their first language, will not have encountered in talk some of the grammatical patterns found in written texts. Sentences with relative clauses, for example, are much more frequent in written texts than in spoken language. As with paragraphing, so experience with texts will broaden children’s range of grammatical patterns. In the early stages, unfamiliar grammar may confuse young readers. Without the support that comes from recognising the syntactic pattern, early readers have to work on each word as a separate unit, working out what it is and storing it in memory while the next word is tackled. But memory spans are limited, and words can drop out of short term memory before the child reader gets to the end of the sentence and has a chance to work out the meaning of the whole. Words The word is a key unit of both form and meaning in reading and writing, perhaps equivalent to a ‘basic level’ in the hierarchy (see Chapter 4), comparable to familiar houses or fields in our satellite picture analogy. In teems of form, words in written text in English have spaces on either side so they are easy to spot, easier than in spoken language where words are often run together. Words are learnt often as wholes, and seem to be recognised on sight, without too much attention to the individual letters that make up the word. Howeves, with the development of better measuring instruments, we now know that skilled readers do look at each component part of a word, and that any changes to a word such as a missing letter can disrupt the reading process. Children’s early reading often begins, naturally, with recognising whole words such as names or shop signs. This word recognition is meaning-driven, and links words to concepts. We must not assume, though, that children process words in the same way as skilled readers. They may pay more attention to what are, in the Jong run, rather irrelevant features, such as the length and shape of the word, and not notice other important intra-word features. Word recognition knowl- edge is a good start to reading, and from here, skills need to be developed upwards to sentences and downwards to smaller, intra-word, units, 130Learning literacy skills ~ Morphemes To move inside words, we can take a visual or a phonological route. The morpheme is a visual unit, a part of a word that carries a meaning through its form, i.e. a grammatical unit of meaning. For example, in the word walked, two morphemes can be identified: walk + ed. The second does not ‘mean’ anything by itself, but, added to the first, it indicates that the action took place in the past. Morphemes are visual units because their shape and spelling mostly remains the same, although they may sound different in different words. Say aloud and notice the three different sounds of the ed morpheme: = At Ad! fat Note Angular brackets <...> are used to show written form; slashes /. . / indicate spoken sounds, which are represented using the phonemic symbols for received pronunciation isi spoken English. Once the visual forms of morphemes are learnt, they are-a (relatively) reliable source of information about meaning for readers, and for writers (Stubbs 1980). Morphemes are the units that are represented by the symbols of a logographic language. . Syllables Syllables are phonological intra-word units. In English, syllables contain one vowel sound, with the possibility of a consonant sound before and after the vowel as well. A syllable can be broken down further, into an ‘onset’ (the first consonant, if there is one) and a ‘rime’ (the vowel + final consonant, if there is one). So, within the word , we find 4 syllables: kee! + / al +/pil + fal. The first syllable has onset /k/ and rime /zt/; the second and fourth syllables are the weak vowel sound used as rimes; the third syllable has the onset /p/ and the rime Al/. Rimes are fairly often spelt consistently, not as reliably as mor- phemes, but reliably enough to provide very useful information for readers. The written form of a rime is sometimes called a ‘phonogram’. Being able to notice the rimes within syllables is one aspect of phonological awareness, and research has shown that phonological 132Teaching Languages to Young Learners awareness correlates highly with reading success in English. You need to be able to hear the sounds inside spoken words in order to under- stand how the alphabet can be used to write words. In the first language research, children with good levels of phonological awareness tended to become successful readers; children with poor levels of phonological awareness tended to have problems in learning to read, and, vice versa, poor readers often had poor phonological awareness. Furthermore, when poor readers have been helped to develop higher levels of phonological ieee their reading skills have benefited (Bryant and Bradley 1985). Phonological awareness develops before children go to school, and seems to be linked to experience with rhyming, words i in songs and rhymes. One of the key learning strategies available at this level is the use of analogy (Goswami 1991). A child who: knows how to read the word bell, can use analogy to help read the new word fell, by noticing that the final rime -ell is the same in both cases. Like many aspects of reading, phonological awareness continues to develop through experience with reading, so that reading and phonolo- gical awareness are interdependent and develop interdependently. However, the evidence is strong enough to support the inclusion in early literacy work of activities that will develop phonological awareness, and we will see how these can be adapted for the young learner classroom later on in the chapter. Letters With letters, we reach the bottom-most level of written text, equivalent to leaves or individual people in our satellite analogy. Written letters have names (e.g. L is called ‘ell), shapes, and sounds. These three aspects of letters must not be confused in learning and teaching. If children have learnt one aspect, this does not imply that they know the others. For example, learning the alphabet as a set of letter names (‘ai, bee, see, dee’. . .) is often a key part of teaching reading. But this is not the same as learning how letters are used to represent sounds. Learning the names of the letters in alphabetical order does not help much in reading, wheréas learning the sounds of the letters helps a lot. I did once have a pupil, who was learning to read in English as a second language, who did use the names of the letters to help him decode the words. He would look at a word like , would say ‘dee ~- aye ~ dee’, and then read /did/, I still do not understand how the process actually helped him to read! This is not to suggest children stop learning the alphaber; knowing the alphabet names and order will help with understanding the written language system and in using dictionaries later on. However, 132Learning literacy skills much more important for learning to read is children’s growing knowl- edge of the links between the written letters and the sounds they represent. The technical term for these links is grapho-phonemic relationships (grapho = written; phonemic = sound). Different languages have different types of grapho-phonemic relationships. In Italian and Spanish, for example, each written letter represents just one sound; there is said to be a ‘one-to-one’ grapho-phonemic relationship. English has a much less straightforward set of grapho-phonemic relationships between the 26 letters of the alphabet and the 44 sounds or phonemes: © Some letters have only one sound: is always pronounced /b/. © Some letters have two possible sounds: can be /s/ as in , or /k/ as in . © Two letters can produce just one sound: is pronounced /k/. Two letters can work to produce a single sound, but with two different possibilities: can sound /0/, as in , or /d/ as in . * The sound of a letter can be affected by the other letters in the word: the sound of is different in and , because of the at the end, which itself is silent. Fluent readers of English use knowledge of grapho-phonemic relation- ships automatically in reading words. A perennial question in teaching. children to read in English is how much they can be helped by direct teaching about grapho-phonemic relationships (phonics teaching), or whether they should be left to pick up the rules indirectly through experience. It is rather like the grammar issue in language teaching, discussed in the previous chapter; we feel that if we could just explain the rules, learning could be made much more efficient but, on the other hand, explaining the rules gets so technical that most children cannot understand the explanations. The solutions in the two cases may be similar too: drawing children’s attention to regular patterns, making sure they notice what is useful information; introducing technical meta- language slowly and carefully; using explanations where they help and do not confuse; developing ways of explaining that make sense to young learners. - In British education in the 80s, many teachers dropped phonics teaching in favour of whole language approaches that stressed overall meaning. In the 90s, it was found that many children were not succeeding in reading, and the blame was put on lack of phonics teaching. Now phonics is back, but combined with top-down, and meaning-focused approaches to texts. The parallels with the move to form-focus in communicative language teaching are striking. 133Teaching Languages to Young Learners. Summary A skilled reader, faced with a text to read and understand, can access information from all the levels mentioned above, together with relevant previous knowledge of the world (Adams 1990). The skills and knowl- edge involved in constructing meaning from reading a text are sum- marised in Figure 6.3. As we have seen, the information from different levels is different in nature and in how it links into meaning; informa- tion can be predominately visual, phonological or semantic. In reaching an understanding of the text, all these different pieces of information are integrated with previous knowledge to construct a coherent meaning. . Children learning to read English need to develop knowledge and skills at the different scales. No ‘right’ way of learning to read has been found, and when we consider the complexity of what has to be learnt, this should not be surprising. What is clear, is that children need to progress within each scale or level, and need to practise integrating across the levels or scales. Just exposing children to one scale, e.g. learning lots of words by sight, or learning to sound out letters, may get them started, but to become skilled readers and writers they need to master techniques for using all the information available in a text. 6.3 Factors affecting learning to read in English as a foreign language The previous sections have set out the learning task that children face in becoming skilled readers and writers of English. In this section, we consider the following factors in foreign language learning contexts that can influence that learning task: e the nature of the written forms of the first language; the learner’s previous experience in Lz literacy; © the learner’s knowledge of the FL; the learner’s age. 6.3.1 First language The Competition model of language use was set out in section 1.5.3. It embodies a theory that helps us think about how our minds are affected by the learning of our first language (or Lx). Each language is structured differently, and the different structures offer users different cues to meaning. So when we learn our first language, our brain / mind ‘tunes 134skilled reading is a process of constructing meaning from written language Learning literacy skills knowledge background knowledge of topic functions of literacy in uses of different genres / text types of texts paragraphing use.and meaning of discourse markers © co-ordination and subordination * word order © meaning of punctuation clause grammar sight vocabulary affixes spelling morphemes ° spelling patterns meanings of common morphemes grapheme-phoneme correspondences the alphabetic principle seript names / shapes of letters of the alphabet e letter clusters / digraphs organisation and structure THE WORLD ty TEXT ty SENTENCES ft 4 WORDS te SYLLABLES (spoken) MORPHEMES (written) t+ SOUNDS - LETTERS ° eo 6¢ @ ee skills activate relevant knowledge of topic activate vocabulary recognise text type locate key information identify main points / detail follow the line of argument work out explicit / implicit meaning work out how clauses relate to each other ; identify verb and relation of other words to the verb recognise formulaic chunks recognise by sight guess meaning of new words from context break words into morphemes break words into syllables break syllables into onset and rime spot same rime / morpheme in different words use analogy te work out word relate letter shape to sound notice initial and final consonants in words blend sounds to syllables Figure 6.3 Skilled reading in EnglishTeaching Languages to Young Learners . into’ the way the particular Lx works, and we learn to attend to the particular cues to meaning that are most helpful. When we meet a new language, our brain / mind automatically tries to apply the first language experience by looking for familiar cues. Part of learning a foreign language is developing new understandings about the particular cues to meaning that the new language offers, and that differ from those of our first language. The ideas of the Competition model apply also to written languages. For example, written English offers cues to meaning at all the different levels set out in Figure 6.3; written Italian and Spanish have much more regular grapho-phonemic relationships, and so the phonological infor- mation offered at letter level is much more reliable. It makes sense to use this reliable information in reading, and reduces the need to attend to other levels of information.: The features of the written language influence the skills and strategies that are most appropriately developed for using it. If Lx readers of Italian or Spanish begin to learn to read English, they are likely to transfer their skills and strategies to the new language. In this example, Spanish learners might need to learn some extra reading skills at the level of grapho-phonemic relationships to equip them for reading English. If we reverse the situation, and imagine English Lx readers learning to read Italian, then things are different, and simpler. A fluent reader of English will need to learn some new sound-letter relationships, but will then find reading Italian quite straightforward because s/he can use the skills and strategies used with English, and will have many fewer irregularities to deal with. A fluent reader of English faced with Russian will need to learn a whole new alphabet, but otherwise similar strategies can be used because the way letters are used to make words is reasonably similar. Faced with Arabic, there is not just a new alphabet but also the right- left direction of writing. Faced with written Putonghua (Mandarin Chinese), the English reader must almost start from scratch! The transferability of knowledge, skills and strategies across lan- guages depends closely on how the two written languages work; it will be different for each pair of languages and for each direction of learning (ie. which has been learnt first) (Koda 1994). What we can say is that English is a complicated alphabetic written language, and almost always requires learners of it as a foreign language to develop new skills and knowledge, in addition to what can be transferred. We can work out what needs to be learnt when learning to read English as a foreign language by comparing the content of section 6.2 with similar analyses of the learners’ first language. 136Learning literacy skills ‘6.3.2 The learner's first language literacy experience To complicate the picture still further, we have, as yet, only talked about fluent readers coming to read a foreign language. If, as happens with young learners, literacy knowledge and skills are only partly developed for the Lz, then only some aspects are available for transfer, and those may be only partially mastered. It is also possible that learners will mix knowledge, skills and strategies between their languages, or even that ‘backward transfer’ (Liu et al. 1992) may occur, with foreign language reading strategies being applied to first language texts. The methodology of teaching literacy skills in the first language must also be considered. The way the child is being, or has been, taught to read the first language will create expectations about how foreign language reading will be taught. While taking a quite different approach in the foreign language classroom may be a good idea, because it helps children to differentiate the languages and the literacy skills required in each, it may also confuse children by requiring them to cope with different definitions of ‘good behaviour’ or ‘success’ in reading. Social aspects of first language literacy may also impact on leaming to read in a foreign language, the extreme case being when a child’s Lz does not have a written form, or when the medium of education is a second language, so that the child does not learn Lz literacy. 6.3.3 The learner's knowledge of the foreign language Oral skills in the new language are an important factor in learning to be literate (Verhoeven 1990). Phonological awareness in the foreign lan- guage, the ability to hear the individual sounds and syllables that make up words, will develop from oral language activities, such as saying rhymes or chants and singing songs. Vocabulary knowledge is extremely important: (a) when a written word is being ‘sounded out’ or buile up from its component letter or morpheme sounds, knowing the word already will speed up recognition, and (b) when a sentence is being read, known words will be easier to hold in short-term memory as meaning is built up. In the early stages, children should only encounter written words that they already know orally. If a text contains unknown words, then either the meanings of these need to be explained in advance, or the meanings must be completely obvious from the rest of the text. Pronunciation skills in the foreign language will both affect literacy and be assisted by literacy development. Because written words are turned into spoken words in the reading process (and vice versa in the 137Teaching Languages to Young Learners writing process), inaccuracies in pronunciation may hamper finding the right spoken word to match what is read. Seeing words written down can help towards accurate pronunciation because of the visibility of all the letters of a word; sounds that might be unstressed, and thus not noticed in listening, will be evident in written form. The reverse of this positive effect is that children may try to pronounce written foreign words using the pronunciation patterns of their first language. In the broader understanding of literacies that was discussed in section 6.2.1 we recognised that children gain much literacy experience before they come to school. In the foreign language, this is less likely to happen, and the teacher can expand children’s experience of literacy in the new language by creating environmental print for the classroom. 6.3.4 Age Age of starting to learn to read clearly overlaps with first language reading experience. However, there are other factors that may make learning to read and write in English a very different experience for children of six or ten years of age. The youngest children are still learning how written text functions, so that they may not be able to transfer even the most general concepts about text and print. They are still mastering the fine motor skills needed to shape and join letters, and so producing a written sentence takes a long time, and, because their attentional capacities are also limited, they may only be able to write a small amount. Also because of constraints on memory, when reading a sentence, they may not be able to recall the beginning by the time they have reached the end. Given the importance of oral skills being established before beginning to read, if very young (under 6 years) foreign language learners do begin reading and writing, this should be at a very simple level, such as environmental uses of English text (see below), tracing their names, or reading single words or simple sentences around objects in the classroom. Teaching children between the ages of 6 and 9 years to read and write in English as a foreign language can make use of some of the methods used with children for whom English is a first language, perhaps with extra stress put on those aspects of English literacy that contrast most strongly with the learners’ first language reading and writing. By the time children reach ro years of age or thereabouts, their first language oracy and literacy are probably quite firmly established; they understand about how written text works; they are in control of the fine motor skills needed for writing; and they are able to talk and think about the differences between languages. So reading and writing can be part of foreign language learning at this age, even for beginners, 138Learning literacy skills - although remembering the caveats about oral skills already mentioned ~ that only familiar vocabulary (and grammar) should be used initially in written form. Teaching reading and writing can utilise any transferable knowledge and skills from first language literacy, such as sounding out words and breaking words into syllables or morphemes, and can provide more focused instruction in skills and strategies that have not been used before and are needed for literacy in English. The next sections move to practical methods and techniques of teaching literacy skills. 6.4 Starting to read and write in English as a foreign language 6.4.1 Objectives for readers up to age 7 Young children will benefit from a broad approach to literacy skills that includes activities from the different scales of Figure 6.3. Here is a suggested list of objectives for early literacy teaching that would provide a sound basis for further learning. Most can be learnt informally rather than through direct teaching. They are not listed in an order of teaching, but using the headings of section 6.2.4: Text — Attitudes to literacy: enjoy being read to from a range of books; enjoy looking at books. — Print conventions: learn how text is written down in lines and pages, with spaces berween words, capital and small letter. — Participate in range of literacy events in school, and link to out of school literacy events. Sentence ~ Lear to copy short sentences that have a personal meaning, and read them aloud. Words ~ Leam a basic set of words by sight. ~— Begin spotting words and letters in books. 139Teaching Languages to Young Learners Morphemes / syllables - Listen to rhymes, chants and songs, and, by joining in with them, learn by heart, and be able to say or sing them. Letters / sounds ~ Learn the names, shapes and sounds of some initial consonants. — Begin to learn the alphabet in order, by name. : 6.4.2 Creating a literate environment in the classroom The language classroom may be the only place where children will be exposed to environmental print in the foreign language, so it is helpful to make the most of the opportunities offered by the classroom environment. Labels Start by labelling the children’s coat hooks, trays, and desks with their names. Bilingual or foreign language labels can be put on furniture and objects around the class and school, and will familiarise children with written forms. There should not be too many labels, and they should be changed after a week or so. Children should be encouraged to look at the labels and talk about what’s on them. A student teacher of mine had the good idea of having a cut-out butterfly that would be found in a different place in the room each day. The children were excited by the challenge of finding the butterfly when they came into the class. If the butterfly (or star or. . .) moves from label to label, children’s attention will be drawn to where the butterfly is and they will notice the word on the label. Posters Colourful posters that include quite a lot of text can be an on-going interest for children, as they gradually recognise more and more of the words. A rhyme that they are learning could be used for this — but notice that this is presenting children with the written words after they have encountered them orally, not before. Advertising posters can be fun, but if teachers have ethical problems with using commercial adverts in class, then posters can be made to advertise healthy eating or teeth cleaning or borrowing library books. 140Learning literacy skills - Making posters for younger pupils would béa good writing activity for older children in the school. om Messages % Using written language for communication boosts children’s motiva- tion, and shows them some of the uses of writing. An English message board in the classroom may have simple messages from the teacher, like Don’t forget your crayons on Friday, or more personal messages that children can write too: My rabbit bad seven babies. A ‘post box’ in the classroom can encourage children to write and send ‘letters’ to each other and the teacher. Reading aloud Reading aloud to young children by the teacher (or other adult) has an enormous range of benefits. It can be done in several ways: Teacher reads aloud, children just listen, and perhaps look at pictures; e Teacher uses a ‘big book’, i.e. a large book with large enough print so that all children can see; @ Each child uses a text. Each situation will create different demands on the child, and, if possible, all three modes of reading aloud should be used. From listening and watching an adult read aloud, children can see how books are handled, how texts encode words and ideas, how words and sentences are set out on a page. Beyond these conventions of print, reading aloud familiarises children with the language of written English: the formulaic openings (Once upon a time ...) and closings (and so they all lived happily ever after.); the patterns of text types — stories and information texts, and sentence types. Affectively, reading aloud can motivate children to want to read themselves. Reading aloud is nor only for the youngest children. Older children continue to benefit, if the texts that are read to them increase in complexity and range. Getting to know different text types through hearing them will have knock-on effects on their own reading and writing. ‘Teachers should ensure that children understand the overall meaning of what they hear and most of the individual vocabulary items in the text. Understanding can be supported by the use of pictures that show characters and action, and by talking about the text in advance and giving enough of the meaning, so that children have a ‘skeleton’ they can build on as they listen. I4tTeaching Languages to Young Learners. Having children read aloud to each other can help learning, but it has problems. If a child is asked to read to the whole class, she may well not speak loud enough for all to hear and, if she stumbles over words, the other children will lose the meaning and probably also the motivation to listen. Paired reading, where children take turns to read to each other in pairs, may be more helpful. it is very important that children regularly read aloud individually to their teacher, since it is only by listening carefully to how children are making sense of written words that we can understand their progress in learning. . 6.4.3 Active literacy learning Making literacy teaching a multi-sensory experience In learning to read and write, children have to make links from meaning to what they see (printed text), what they hear (the spoken language) and what they produce (written words). To assist the building and strengthening of all these various sorts of mental connections, we can use d-range of modes and senses. Early literacy ‘activities can provide opportunities for children to see, hear, manipulate, touch and feel. For example, if children are learning the letter shape , then, as well as practising writing the shape, they need to see the shapes on display in the classroom and in their books. They might cut -out examples of the letter $ from newspapers and magazines and make a collage of them. They might paint, trace, colour in, join the dots, use modelling clay to make the shape; they can draw the shape in a tray of sand, or make the shape with glue on a card and sprinkle sand over to make a ‘feely-S’. They can be asked to visualise the shape in their minds and to imagine drawing the shape. They can make the sound /sss/, long and short, with different emotions: a happy /sss/ and a sad /sss/. Tf sight words are being learnt, the same range of possibilities for multi-sensory practice exists. . : Coloured chalks or pens are helpful to highlight key features of texts, sentences or words. . Attention to detail Children spend the first years of their lives learning about ‘conservation’: they learn as babies thar when their mothers leave the room, they do not need to panic because she will come back. They learn that a ‘cup’ is still a ‘cup’ even when it is upside down or used to hold flowers rather than liquid. However, when they meet written text, they have to focus on a 142Learning literacy skills -finer level of detail as to what matters and does not matter: a letter M upside down is not an M, but a different letter, W; that both and are called ‘dee’, but if the upright stroke is too short, it is no longer ‘dee’, but ‘ai’; that has a quite different meaning from . In a letter shape, attention must be paid to the length of each stroke, relative to the others in the letter, and to the roundness or straightness of shapes. In addition to multi-sensory experience of these, teachers can play an important role in directing attention to what matters, showing children the easiest way to make shapes and giving feedback to children on their individual efforts. Over time, children’s attempts will get closer and closer to conventional shapes. Fun with literacy skills There is a lot to learn about written English and the more fun that can be had in the process the better. Learning the alphabet can be made more exciting by singing or chanting it rhythmically. It can be recited backwards or starting somewhere other than A. Simple games may help interest and motivation: e.g. the teacher says a letter at random from the alphabet and children shout out the next letter (or the next but one, or the one before). See Greenwood (1997) for more literacy games. : 6.4.4 Literacy events and routines in the foreign language classroom ‘We can take the idea of a ‘literacy event’ as being some kind of social activity that involves reading and writing, and see that it can link to the idea of ‘routines’ and ‘formats’ (section 1.4). We can then find and develop opportunities in foreign language classrooms for lieracy events. Figure 6.4 shows how a regular Birthday routine can incorporate various types of reading and writing. If more or less the same routine happens for each child in the class, the written text becomes part of the event and will be learnt through participation in the event. Other classroom routines that can integrate literacy include com- pleting weather and date charts; devising rotas for classroom duties; checking attendance; and recording reading progress, e.g. each time a child finishes a book, the title is written on a chart or picture. 6.4.5 Formal approaches to teaching literacy skills Learning to read and write can begin from text level; from sentence level; from word level; from lerter level. Each starting point has 143Teaching Languages to Young Learners, Birthdays Display es] || [ee] Achartof months j.— wrth children's oa Ooo names and birthdays The Routine — say the same every week or month: Tr’s birthday time! Who's got a birthday this week? (read names of children with birthdays together} Jamalia — it’s your birthday! How old are you going to be? \— Class v to Jamalia. Clap 7 times (because she’s 7) Present list Jamalia wants -adoll -a ball + some crayons Give her a birthday draw a picture for Jamalia Write on the board it’s Jamalia’s birthday to Figure 6.4 Meaningful reading and writing in classroom routines 144Learning literacy skills . produced approaches to teaching reading that can be used in the foreign language classroom. Emergent literacy "Emergent literacy’ describes the (first language) phenomenon in which children seem to leam to read without any teaching, gradually, and through exposure to text and to reading (Hall 1987). When children spend lots of time being read to from interesting and appropriate books, some will begin to work out for themselves the patterns and regularities that link spoken and written text. It is this process that has been called ‘emergent literacy’. If you have been involved with such a process, you will understand the sense of excitement and amazement at seeing the human mind at work. However, attempts to turn the ideas of emergent literacy into a full-scale teaching methodology, as ‘real books’ approach or an ‘apprenticeship approach’ (Waterland 1985), have floundered and have been seen, with some justification, as rather dangerous. The main problem with the notion of emergent literacy is that it works only for some children; most children need more. structured help with the multiple and non-natural skills of literacy. Furthermore, in order for literacy to ‘emerge’, a child needs lots of time individually with a skilled adult and a plentiful supply of good quality story books; conditions that are not always available in school classrooms! However, the emergent literacy ‘movement’ has had a useful impact on ideas about reading. It reminds us to put the learner first, because each child has to build up literacy skills from their own experience with texts; it has produced useful evidence about how children find “entry points’ into the complexity of reading; it reinforces the importance of childrea understanding what they read; and it has highlighted some of the qualities of good books for children and how school text books are often much less interesting and well-produced. As a result of the attention to the quality of children’s reading books, commercial pub- lishers have developed better quality story books that work alongside more structured and artificial texts with controlled vocabulary. The entry points to reading found in emergent literacy are useful to note because they suggest ways into reading for young children that can be adapted for classroom contexts. Emergent readers often begin to know by heart sentences from favourite books, learning them from hearing them over and over, and will say them along with the adult reader. This ‘speaking with the text’ is not really ‘reading’, but it can be the start of learning to read. They then begin to pick out known words from text and to spot letters, linking the shapes with the sounds. With skilled adult help, this can be built into the kinds of knowledge and 145Teaching Languages to Young Learners skills set out in Figure 6.3. The child’s learning starts from having a meaning for a whole text, and moving to attend to words and letters. Most of the work on emergent literacy has come from first language’ or immersion contexts, and the appropriacy of such ideas in FL contexts is not immediately clear (but see Hudelson 1994). However, a small project in a Malaysian kindergarten is demonstrating the possibilities (Cameron and Bavaharji 2000). The project has worked with parents as a key to early reading, encouraging them to read books in English with their five-year-old children, and providing activities linked to literacy, as well as a collection of interesting books that the children could choose and take home with them. While the project outcomes are still to be analysed, it was clear from seeing parents and children reading together, and from listening to children read their books, that some children have made enormous progress in literacy skills and in oral language skills over the six months of the project. The improvement in oral skills is an interesting development, and seems to have happened as children started to use the words and phrases of the books with their parents. It was not the case that these families all used English at home; some did, usually along with their first language, but others did not. They were not particularly privileged families, but the parents with the strongest motivation for their children’s success seem, not surprisingly, to have produced the most benefits. Emergent literacy ideas may then have potential for foreign language literacy, but I suggest that, as in first language, it works best-for a subset of children, and that most learners will need more formal teaching alongside experiences with books. The features of emergent literacy that are most relevant for foreign language teaching are: - children choose the books they want to hear and read; — children are motivated by choice and by the quality of the writing they encounter; ~ children often choose to read the same book many times, and this is a valuable learning experience; - meaning comes first because the child understands the story as a whole; ~ from this overall meaning, attention moyes to whole words and letters, beginning with initial consonants, then final consonants, then vowels in the middle; ~ the link between reading and oral skills is very strong because children adopt and play with the language of the story; — parents can be involved with their children’s language learning through reading aloud with them. 146Learning literacy skills lanavage Experience approach ‘The Language Experience approach starts 's children reading and writing . at sentence level, and its key feature is the child’s use of his or her own experience as the topic of texts. It has been commercially produced as ‘Breakthrough to Literacy’, which has been widely used with children in Britain, for first language literacy, and with South African children in both their first and their second languages. In the commercial version, children compose sentences, with their teacher initially, from a set of word cards. The sentence is something the child wants to say: e.g. ‘I went to.the doctor yesterday.’ They physically move the word cards, choosing them and placing them into a plastic tray to make the sentence, placing a full stop card at the end. The sentence is then read back to the teacher, and the child copies it down in her or his book, which pushes attention to the formation of letters. Gradually, a child builds up a collection of words that are known, and moves to making several sentences. Once the sight vocabulary is established, small books are introduced. As a way of starting reading, this method has some‘nice features, which can be adopted in foreign language classrooms: ~ the child’s ideas are used to compose the reading text; — child and teacher together compose the sentences; ~ the child’s learning moves from a meaningful idea unit (the sentence as a mini-text) to whole words to letters; ~ words have a physical reality, as well as meaning, for the child as they are moved and put together; — punctuation is present from the start as part of the physical reality of sentences: spaces between words and full stops; ~ the integration of writing and reading helps the child see how texts are composed and understood right from the start. Starting from the child’s experience in order to produce texts can be done in a foreign language classroom too, e.g. by constructing sentences linked to current topics and vocabulary. Children can draw a picture that is then written about, or they can illustrate a sentence that they have dictated. to the teacher to ‘scribe’ for them. Language Experience work can be done as a whole class, as well as individually, if the teacher asks for sentences from children and writes them on the board to build up a text. The process of joint writing ptesents an opportunity for talking with the children about the words, punctuation, spelling, or text organisation, which can help children’s metalinguistic knowledge and push them to ‘notice certain features of written English. If the writing is done on large sheets of paper, the 147Teaching Languages to Young Learners product of joint writing can be made into a big book for the class, and used for further reading activities. Sets of word cards, large ones for whole class use and small ones for individual or .pair work, can be made and used for many reading activities, including making sentences. In early literacy work, children may be asked to help compose a sentence, which is written on the board, and then use small word cards to form the same sentence themselves. They can make sentences with a partner, or for a partner to read. ‘When we hold the Language Experience.approach up against the full set of reading skills and knowledge set out in Figure 6.3 we can sec that, while it starts children reading and writing through meaningful word and sentence-level work, there will also need to be, at some point, a focus on letter-sound relationships. _ Whole words / key words approach THis approach was used in the globally popular Ladybird series, and in many, other commercial reading series. It starts from word level, with childten looking at single words on cards’ (called ‘flash cards’, because they are sometimes shown very quickly to the children, or ‘flashed’ in front of their eyes) to encourage rapid whole word recognition. A child will begin with five or six very common words, such as mummy and likes, The child practises saying the word when he sees the card, and once the first five or six are mastered, moves on to the next set. Once the chiid has about 15 words, very simple books are introduced that only use the known words. The child then reads the books at that level to the teacher, one or two pages a day, and practises alone. The term ‘key words’ was used because the sight words taught were taken from the most frequently used words in English. As we saw in section 4.3.1, many of the most frequent words are function words, such as for or was, that do not have clear lexical meanings but create meanings when they are used with content words. In learning to read, these words are probably better, and more easily, learnt through multiple encounters in contexts of use, rather than separated from other words on a card. Another problem with this method is the limited interest of the texts that can be written with a smal] number of words. The flashcard method for learning whole words can take a child to quite a high level as a beginner reader, but after about 50 words, it is not efficient, or even possible, to remember each word as a separate whole. To progress, the method relies on the child generalising and finding patterns and regularities in the words being learnt, i.e. the child needs to use information about letters and sounds as well. As with emergent literacy, some children do this mental work automatically, and more or 148Learning literacy skills . less teach themselves to read. Many others though need focused help with the sounds of letters and how letters go together to make words. The features of whole word methods that are relevant for foreign language contexts include: - children get practice at fast recognition of whole words through use of flashcards; ~ children get a good sense of achievement and motivation by being able to read a whole book quite early; ~ the sight vocabulary can provide a resource that the child can use to work out how letters combine into syllables. Phonics teaching Phonics teaching focuses on letter-sound relations, building literacy skills from the bottom-up. The usual way involves showing children the sounds of the different letters in the alphabet, then how letters can be combined. A recent approach (McGuiness 1997) suggests children will find it more natural to start from sounds and learn which letters make them, since they are: moving from experience with the spoken language to the new world of written letters and words. Phonics teaching works if it directs children’s attention to letter-sound level features of English and helps children make the mental connections between letters and sounds. It can be very dry, boring and demotivating, if done in isolation, so it is probably preferable to incorporate five or ten minutes of concentrated phonics work inside other activities. Phonics work can be integrated into story reading, class joint writing, sentence writing activities, songs and rhymes, when vocabulary is being pre- sented or recycled, and in stages of oral tasks. . Progression in phonics teaching (based on Dechant 1991) Consonants in English are easier to notice, and thus to learn, than vowels, They can be grouped for teaching in various ways, by the way the shape is formed in writing, by the hard / soft sounds they make, by frequency and usefulness. One suggested teaching order for English consonants is: i. bedghjmnptw 2. firs 3. ¢g (soft sounds) 4. VXYZ Iris usual to start with single consonants that occur as onsets in syllables or in single syllable words, drawing children’s attention to them, 149Teaching Languages to Young Learners identifying their name and sound, playing games with them such as spotting them in books, practising writing the letter shapes so that sounds, reading and writing reinforce each other It is important in phonics teaching to make activities meaningful for children, ‘and to make connections with what they already know. Thus, using words the children know by sight as the context for work on letters and sounds, is likely to be more meaningful than abstract and unconnected chanting. of letter names and shapes. For example, if the letter and sound {, /b} is to be taught, then children can be shown objects such as a ball, a blue balloon, and a big basket, and the written words for each. They then have a meaningful context for the letter and sound. They can look at the words and spot the letter shape; they can listen and hear the sound. The teaching brings the shape and sound together for the children so that they can make the mental connection. To reinforce the connection, a ‘b table’ might be set up in the classroom and children asked to bring in objects from home that have a /b/ sound. The teacher then labels each object as it is placed on the table. Phonics teaching can move to consonants that occur at the ends of words, and then to vowels. The English vowel system is notoriously complicated: out of the five vowel letters, a range of different vowel sounds can be produced: long vowel sounds, short. vowel sounds, and diphthongs that combine two vowel sounds, as in . The sound a vowel makes is partly determined by. the letters that surround it and its position in a word and some letters are silent. In deciding what to teach explicitly, short vowel sounds are fairly consistent and thus a good place to start, e.g. the sounds in hat / pet / sit | hop / run. The ‘Magic -e’ rule can then expand these sounds: this rule says that an <-e> on the end ofa single syllable word affects the vowel sound, which then (in child friendly terms) ‘says its own name’: ¢.g. hate / pete / site / hope / June. This rule is a good example of a useful phonics rule, because it is quite simple and true often enough to make it worth learning (although some exceptions do occur in frequently used words, such as come). Many other rules are so complex and have so many exceptions that they may not be worth trying to teach explicitly. Long vowel sounds in open syllables, such as me and go, can be usefully taught next, and then work on rimes can extend reading and writing skills e.g. -ite, -eat, -ike. This content will cover several years of work. 6.5 Continuing to learn to read We move in this section to think about how we move children on with literacy skills once they have made a start with reading and writing in 150Learning literacy skills the foreign language. Similar.methods and techniques may also be used with children who start learning the language from 9 or x0 years of age, and thus bring some first language literacy knowledge and skills to the process. 6.5.1 Learming a range of reading strategies If children are to become independent readers, they need to acquire a wide range of strategies for making sense of texts. Evidence from helping children who are’ struggling to learn to read shows that they - often stick with only one or two sources of information, which may work at the beginning stages, but which need augmenting with strate- gies at other scales for progression to fluent reading (Clay 1982). The child who picks up a set of words that she recognises as whole words, and uses this sight vocabulary to read simple texts, needs to also develop knowledge of grapho-phonemic relationships within words to progress to more difficult texts. On the other hand, the child who has learnt the names and sounds of the letters and can read simple, regular . words by ‘sounding them out’, needs also to recognise morphemes by sight and to draw on grammatical information at sentence level if progression is to be made. Wherever a child starts in reading, the teacher needs to make sure development takes him or her to the other scales and that reading activities require the active integration of information across scales. T would like, as an example, to recount my experience of reading with a little girl, who I shall call Mary. She was taking part in the Malaysian early literacy project that I described earlier in the chapter, and was one of those children making rapid progress with her reading. I asked her to choose a book to read to me; she chose one she had read many times before, and read it fast and fluently. I then gave her a different book to read, that she had not read before, $0 that she would be moved into her zone of proximal development and I would be able to see the strategies she used for unknown words. The book was about a girl and her pushchaix, and it was this latter word that gave her the first problem. Mary’s initial strategy was to look at me to tell her the new word; clearly this was what usually happened. Instead of just telling her, I showed her how she could break up into two ‘bits’ (morphemes): and , and showed her the word in the first book, where she had read it with no difficulty. She was then able to work out for herself. I checked that she knew its meaning by asking her to point to the pushchair in the picture. By doing this, I had introduced her to the strategies of breaking down words, and using context as a support for meaning. At the same time, she was being 15Teaching Languages to Young Learners | helped to see that words can be separated from the cotext, i.e. the surrounding text, in which they first appeaz. As we went on with the book, I helped her to use various other strategies with new words: ~ With the word , I pointed to the first letter, the sound of which she knew, and she then managed to sound out the word. She used phonics knowledge and skills to attack new words. I showed her the bar on the pushchair in a picture, because it seemed thar she did not know the meaning. — With the word , I just told her the word and did not spend any time on it, because it was not crucial to the meaning of the story and is not a particularly useful word to learn at her stage. - With the word I told her the word and then explained the meaning as the story progressed and the heroine moved from break- fast to lunch to tea. She would probably remember this as a sight word because that was her major learning strategy to date and she had a well developed memory for sight words. — When she came to , she said ‘washing’. From this ‘miscue’, I could see that she was making a good attempt at the word and had noticed the imitial consonant and the final rime -ixg. I pointed out the words that followed the verb, and the picture, i.e. the cotext and context, and she was then able to correct her guess to ‘watching’. In our talk about reading, her strategy, of working out a word through analogy with a known word, was refined by using visual and cotextua! information. By the time we reached the end of the pushchair story, Mary had changed her expectation that I, as the adult, would tell her all the words she did not know, and was beginning to look closely at new words and try to work them out herself. As a helpful adult, I was providing, for learning to read, the types of scaffolding that are listed in Table 1.x ~ not doing the work for Mary, but helping her to see how she could do it herself. Five minutes spent listening to a child reading will reveal what knowledge and skills the child is bringing to reading, and what informa- tional cues and strategies are being used to deal with unfamiliar words. From what is found out, the teacher can see where the child can move next in literacy development. 6.5.2 Focused teaching about written language forms Explicit teaching about features of the written language can help move children on, as part of a broader reading skills programme. In this section, I set out a basic procedure for doing short, intensive, focused periods of teaching around lower-level literacy features within FL 152Learning literacy skills dessons (drawing on Dechant 1991). The procedure has five steps. It starts and finishes with meaningful discourse, focusing in the middle steps on the precise aspect of literacy writing that is the goal of the teaching. It can be used to fill gaps in children’s knowledge and skills, or to highlight areas in which the FL literacy works differently from the Lz. The Steps 1. Start from a meaningful context. . 2. Focus the pupils’ attention on the unit and key feature being taught. 3. Give input: examples, a rule, etc. 4. Provide varied practice. 5. Give pupils opportunities to apply their new knowledge and skills in different, meaningful contexts. These steps can be followed for any of the literacy features at word level or below: sight words initial consonants rimes final consonants vowels morphemes consonant clusters and blends As an example, I describe an activity aimed at 9-10 year olds that was devised by a group of Malaysian primary teachers, around the rime . They first created the ‘meaningful context’ by listing words in which the rime occurs and making up a ‘jazz chant’ that used as many as possible (following Graham 2979). The chant they produced went as follows: THE MAIL SNAIL 1 Iseea snail ‘With a very long rail. He’s crawling on the rail To deliver the mail. He’s sure to fail Because he’s stuck on a nail. They produced a graphic drawing to illustrate the plight of the poor postman snail. The picture and oral chant were introduced as the first step. In Step 2, the written version was used, with the <-ail> rime highlighted in red at the end of the lines to draw attention to it. In Step 153Teaching Languages to Young Learners 35 the words containing <-ail> were taken from the chant and presented in isolation on the board or on large cards. They could then be positioned to emphasise the shape and sound of the rime: sn ail tail rail m ail £ ail nail The initial letters could be removed by rubbing out or cutting off. As Step 4,4 quick game-like activity could prodtice words for the children to recognise, by placing initial consonants next to the rime. Once the children have paid attention in these ways-to the feature, they should have made a good start at learning it, and the last step is to move back out to a larger discourse context in which they can apply their new knowledge. In this example, it might be to say the chant again or to compose a new one, using other (known) words like sail, pail, jail, along with some of the original words. 6.6 Developing reading and writing as discourse skills This chapter bas stressed that literacy-is about communication and that, even when the focus is on learning about the mechanics of how reading works, we can still find ways for literacy to play a role in social life, inside and beyond the classroom. When writing is used to wish a friend ‘Happy Birthday’ or reading used to understand a message on the class notice board, literacy skills are operating as discourse skills. On the other hand, J have also wanted to emphasise that, without informed and focused attention to the mechanics of reading and writing, children may be denied access to literacy in their first and foreign languages, and that a great deal of focused work is needed to help children make a good start in learning to read and write. The previous section showed how that focused work can continue as children move through their primary years. Alongside developing knowledge and skills at lower levels, older children can be helped to develop their written discourse skills, at sentence level and above. Developments can be seen along various interacting dimensions. 6.6.1 ‘Fluency’ in writing and reading ‘Fluency’ in spoken language use has a written equivalent, although there is not a single word to label it. In reading in the foreign language, 154Learning literacy skills . the integration of different level reading skills in tackling a text will gradually become more automatic and, faster. Skilful readers can be encouraged to try to read silently; they will need reminding to keep their lips still at first, and to try to read ‘through the brain rather than the mouth’. It can take several months or more to make this transition, and it may only happen for a few readers at primary level. In writing, children who have mastered letter shapes and spelling, can be encouraged to write gradually more. To become a fluent writer, it is necessary to write often and at length. Children can be encouraged to choose and copy texts that they find interesting: items from the Internet on their favourite pop star or footballer, or the rhymes learnt in class, or sections of their reading books that they enjoyed. The element of choice is to ensure that copying is meaningful and motivating. Another way to encourage extended writing is to ask children to write a journal, giving them a regular five or ten minutes in class to write whatever they want, or about a topic from the news that they are given, perhaps without worrying about correct spellings or grammar. This kind of writing should not be ‘corrected’, but it might be responded to, by the teacher reading the entries every now and again and writing some thoughts down in response to:the child’s writing. 6.6.2 Complexity of written language -Much reading and writing in language classrooms happens in support of other aspects of language learning, such as writing down vocabulary to remember it or reinforcing new grammar patterns. In general, the level of the language thar pupils write will lag slightly behind the level that they are comfortable with in speaking and listening. The com- plexity of language that they read will usually match spoken levels, but as children mature as readers so they will be able to read language that is more complex, without being worried by not recognising it all. For older children, written text can introduce new aspects of language. 6.6.3 Learning to write for an audience Throughout the years of primary education, children gradually develop a more sophisticated understanding of how other people think and function, as they develop a ‘theory of mind’ that enables empathy with others (Frith r990). This aspect of social and emotional development will impact on their ability to write (or speak) for an audience, which requires selecting and adapting language so that other people can make sense of the writer’s ideas and arguments. The skills involved in expressing oneself for other people do not receive much attention in IssTeaching Languages to Young Learners foreign language classrooms, but have been quite prominent in ap- proaches to teaching writing at primary level in the UK; writing done by children should have a clear Audience, Purpose and Topic (i.e: it should be ‘APT’). If writing in the foreign language is to have an audience and purpose then we have to think beyond writing to practise grammar or vocabulary; possible activities might include: — letters and e-mail messages, written and sent to authors of books, pen friends overseas, magazines, schools in other countries, children in the next class; : ~ very simple stories, written for younger children learning the foreign language in the same school; — articles about class events and reviews of books, new films or TV programmes, written for a class or school magazine or computer bulletin board. : Texts that are designed for an audience are worth spending more time on, and naturally promote the idea of working on several drafts, editing each in the process of producing a final version that is ready for other people to read. Editing drafts helps children develop self-direction in writing by offering them an external model of how to check their work. The experience of checking work with others can then be internalised and become a tool for individual learners. When children are learning to edit their writing, it may be helpful to focus on one or two features only at each stage. An initial draft might be read aloud to a group for comments on how well others will understand its overall idea. A later draft might be checked in pairs for verb endings or use of the definite and indefinite articles, the / a(1). 6.6.4 Leaming conventional formats for different types of discourse In Chapter 3, we met the notion of ‘discourse repertoires’ and different types of discourse organisation; when applied to written text, we talk of ‘genres’ or ‘text types’. As children develop as readers and writers, and cope with longer texts, they will begin to notice and use the pattems of organisation in different text types. Teachers can support this by using texts from a range of genres and by making explicit the structure of typical information texts or story texts, and showing children how the parts are put together. To focus on text structure, short texts with clear structure and organisation can be photocopied and cut into parts. Children have to read and put the parts in order as a group, discussing what it was about the text that made them decide on a particular order. This kind of activity will get children thinking and talking about the parts of a 156Learning literacy skills - description or narrative, and they can be helped to notice how language is used to signal the parts, e.g. through a'topic sentence at the beginning of a paragraph, or through signal words or discourse markers. When children write texts that need a particular type of organisation, they can be shown how to write a plan that shows the parts, the content and the links, and they can be encouraged to talk about their plan to the teacher or to a partner before writing the full text. Small groups might produce a longer text by sharing out the work amongst themselves. Joint writing by teacher and pupils, mentioned already, can be an occasion where the teacher can talk about the text, using helpful metalanguage; e.g, We’ve introduced the people in the story; perhaps we should tell the reader what the big problem was. . 2 More ideas for using texts will be found in the next chapter; in themé-based learning, written sources of information offer many oppor- tunities for developing reading skills in the foreign language, and sharing what has been discovered about a topic creates possibilities for writing with a clear purpose and audience. 6.7 Summary and conclusion 6.7.1 Summary This chapter has examined in some detail what it means to be able to read in English, as a first and as a foreign language. It has emphasised the central point that constructing the meaning of a written text requires the reader to extract and integrate various types of information fom many levels of a text. In very early literacy development, combining the learning of reading and writing will help pupils to come to understand how a particular language encodes meaning in written symbols. To fully appreciate what ir means to become literate in a foreign language, we must use theory and empirical research to draw up a picture of how fluent readers operate in both the first and the foreign languages, like that shown for English in Figure 6.3. We then have some idea of which knowledge and skills can be transferred to the foreign language and which will need to be learnt from scratch. 6.7.2 Literacy beyond the primary classroom If children leave their early foreign language learning able to read and write simple texts in the foreign language, and use a good range of reading strategies, they will have a solid foundation for future literacy development. Just as important, though, they need to feel positive about 157Teaching Languages to Young Learners reading and writing in the foreign language, to understand why literacy is useful and to enjoy tackling a text in the foreign language, confident that they will be able to get something from it. The many colourful: story and information books now available for children will motivate them to try reading in the foreign language and to enjoy the process, without needing to understand every word, and the next chapter considers how such books can be used from the earliest stages. Apart from books in school that pupils can choose from and take home, there is now an endless source of information in English on the Interner, including sites run by teachers in different countries that show their-pupils’ writing. The world of cyberspace relies on literacy skills, and it already offers exciting possibilities for literacy skills development, as well as ones we cannot yet imagine. 1587 Learning through stories 7.1 Stories and themes as holistic approaches to language teaching and learning Stories and themes are placed together in this chapter and the next because they represent holistic approaches to language teaching and learning that place a high premium on children’s involvement with rich, authentic uses of the foreign language. Stories offer a whole imaginary world, created by language, that children can enter and enjoy, learning language as they go. Themes begin from an overarching topic or idea that ‘can branch out in many different directions, allowing children to pursue personal interests through the foreign language. © Exploring the use of stories and themes will allow us to re-visit the principles and approaches of earlier chapters, as we work through the possibilities and opportunities they offer. The approach in this book has been underpinned by the principle that children and their learning can guide teaching; in particular, J have tried to show how directions for teaching can emerge from the dynamic interplay between possible casks, activities, and materials, on the one hand, and children’s desire to find and construct coherence and meaning, on the other. When we have looked in previous chapters at aspects of the foreign language, task content and materials have been designed for the classroom. As we move now to stories and themes, we start from materials and content that have a more independent existence beyond the classroom. Stories bring into the classroom texts that originate in the world outside school; themes organise content and activity around ideas or topics that are broader than the organising ideas in most day-to-day classroom language learning, and that might be found structuring events outside the classroom such as television documentaries or community projects. Bringing the world into the classroom by using stories and themes creates different demands for the foreign language teacher. The teacher has to work from the theme or story to make the content accessible to learners and to construct activities that offer language learning opportu- nities, and in doing so needs many of the skills and language knowledge of text book writers. In continuing to develop a learning-centred perspective to teaching foreign languages to children, I will emphasise the need for teachers to plan classroom work with clear language learning goals in mind. These 1599Teaching Languages to Young Learners more holistic, top-down methods sometimes appear to generate more than their share of fuzzy thinking about how children can learn from taking part in them. While the outcomes of activities are, perhaps, less predictable, we should still aim to think clearly about how tasks are organised and what children learn from them. A large part of the skill in designing good activities lies in recognising and exploiting opportunities that language use offers for language learning. Stories are frequently claimed to bring many benefits to young learner classrooms, including language development (Wright 1997; Garvie 1990). The power attributed to stories, which sometimes seems to move towards the mystical and magical, is probably generated by their links into poetics and Literature in one direction and to the warmth of early childhood experiences in another. Stories can serve as metaphors for’ society or for our deepest psyche (Bettelheim 1976), and parent-child story reading can be rich and intimate events that contrast sharply with the linear aridity of syllabuses and some course books (Garton and Pratt 1998). However, classrooms are not family sitting rooms, teachers are not their pupils’ parents, and many of the texts in books found in schools are not poetic, meaningful stories that will instantly capture children’s imagination. I suggest that we can best serve young learners by adopting a critical stance to the use of stories, aiming to clarify the qualities of good stories for the language classrooms. We should also be careful that our own nostalgia does not push the use of stories beyond the reality of learners’ lives in this ‘information age’. Children participate in many literacy events outside school that involve texts that are not stories, and that combine text and visuals in varied and dynamic ways. They may be equally motivated by the importing of some of these other text types into classrooms, and we will look at some possibilities in the final section. We look first at what we mean by ‘stories’, differentiating stories from other kinds of text in terms of what they contain and how they are composed. We examine quality in stories, and how we can discriminate *good’ stories from less good ones. We then move to what makes a story useful for foreign language learning. 7.2 The discourse organisation of stories Story telling is an oral activity, and stories have the shape they do because they are designed to be listened to and, in many situations, participated in. The first, obvious, key organising feature of stories is that events happen at different points in time; they occur in a temporal 160Learning through stories sequence. The other key organising feature of stories is their thematic structure i.e. there is some central interest factor (theme) that changes over the timescale of the story: difficulties or evil are overcome, or a major event is survived. Very often the thematic structure of a story can be characterised as the resolution of a problem (Hoey 1983). A narrative does not need a thematic structure other than the unfolding of time, but it is then a kind of commentary rather than a story. These two central features of a story can be illustrated by considering a children’s story well known in Europe and beyond, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, Fairy tales like this have existed for many years, and have spread from one culture to another, and one language to another. In this evolutionary process, they have retained and developed features that we now think of as prototypical of stories for children. In other parts of the world, there are parallels to the European fairy tale tradition: Ashanti tales in west Africa and the Caribbean; Mouse Deer stories in south-east Asia; and Nasruddin stories in Arabic countries in the Middle East, Turkey and north Africa. In the story of Little Red Riding Hood (LRRH, for short), the main characters are a little girl, who bas a red coat with a hood, hence the nickname, and who lives with her parents near a forest, and a big bad wolf, who wants to eat people, and who provides the problem. The story covers the events of one day, when Little Red Riding Hood visits her grandmother and on the way, despite her mother’s warnings, leaves the path to pick flowers, and meets the wolf. She tells the wolf where she is going and he rushes ahead, eats the grandmother, dresses in her clothes, and waits for the girl to arrive. LRRH does not notice that it is the wolf in her grandmother’s bed, and is about to be eaten by the wolf, when, just in time, her father arrives and kills the wolf. The grandmother jumps out of his stomach, and all ends happily. The story has two morals: that wickedness will be overcome and, at a more specific level, that children should do what their parents tell them. The structure of typical stories was analysed by Propp (1958) and many of the same features have been found in analyses of how people tell stories in their conversations (Labov 1972). Prototypical features of stories, that will be found in most versions of LRRH, are: ~ an opening: often formulaic in fairy tales e.g. ‘Once upon atime. . 2’; ~ introduction of characters; description of the setting; ~ introduction of a problem; — aseries of events; ~ that lead to - 162Teaching Languages to Young Learners - — the resolution of the problem ~ a closing: often formulaic in fairy tales - ‘They all lived happily ever after’; . . -a moral: which may or may not be explicitly stated. ‘We should note that many texts found in course books may be called ‘stories’, but in fact may lack some of these prototypical features. Most often they lack a plot; instead of setting up a problem and working towards its resolution, the characters just move through a sequence of activities. Teachers should not assume that such non-stoties will capture children’s imagination in the same way that stories can do. LRRH illustrates yet more features of stories, that are common, but not always all found in every story. Firstly, the way that the story is told sets up dramatic irony, in that the reader knows more than the central character. In this case, the reader knows that the ‘grandmother’ who LRRH finds in bed is really that wolf dressed up, and also knows that. LRRH does not know. A sense of suspense is created by this knowledge gap between story characters and audience, motivating listeners to want to find out what will happen when LRRH arrives at her grandmother’s house. Secondly, there is predictability built into the narrative, through a kind of lock-step progression in which one incident seems to lead inevitably to the next: mother warns LRRH not to leave the path or talk to the wolf => LRRH leaves the path and talks to the wolf => LRRH tells the wolf about her grandmother => the wolf goes to the grandmother's house => LRRH tells the wolf / grandmother she has big teeth => the wolf tries to eat LRRH. Thirdly, this predictability and sense of inevitability is broken by the surprise event of the arrival of LRRH’s father ro save her. The pattern of a sequence of familiar and predictable events, interrupted by a surprise, echoes the one of ‘security and novelty’ that we met in section 1.4, and it is probably a pattern that suits human psychology: a degree of comfortable familiarity combined with just the right amount of surprise and change. In other stories, the predictability and continuity is constructed by the repetition of events, with just a small change: as when, in another familiar tale, Goldilocks tries out firstly the beds, then the chairs, and finally the porridge of the Three Bears. In each of these episodes, she first tries the Daddy Bear’s bed / chair / porridge, then the Mummy Bear’s, and finally the Baby Bear’s. And in each instance, the first and second are unsuitable, but the third is ‘just right’. 162Learning through stories - 7.3 Language use in stories Children’s stories contain uses of language that are considered typical of poetic and literary texts. Many of these devices offer opportunities for foreign language learning. 7.3.1 Parallelism ‘The pattern of predictability + surprise, or repetition + change, is often reflected in patterns of repetition of language. For example, when LRRH arrives at her grandmother’s house and talks to the wolf wearing the old woman’s clothes, their dialogue goes like this: LRRH: Grandmother, what bigeyes BBW: All the better to see you you've got! with, my dear. LRRH: Grandmother, what big ears BBW: All the better to hear you you've gor! with, my dear. LRRH: Grandmother, what big teeth BBW: All the better to EAT you you've got! with... This repeated pattern, or parallelism, creates a way into the story for the active listener, as well as providing a natural support for language learning. 7.3.2 Rich vocabulary Because stories are designed to entertain, writers and tellers choose and use words with particular care to keep the audience interested. Stories may thus include unusual words, or words that have a strong phonolo- gical content, with interesting rhythms or sounds that are onomato- poeic. The context created by the story, its predictable pattern of events and language, and pictures, all act to support listeners’ understanding of unfamiliar words. Children will pick up words that they enjoy and, in this way, stories offer space for growth in vocabulary. As an example of how a simple story can incorporate rich vocabulary, we can look at the story Ox the Way Home by Jill Murphy, which includes the following words: e to describe familiar story book characters: vast, huge, enormous, hairy, gigantic; ® to describe how they moved: zooming, lumbering, slithering, soaring, creeping, gliding, swooping; © to describe what the heroine did: struggled, crammed, tickled, stamped, punched. 163Teaching Languages to Young Learners Children’s understanding of this lexis is very strongly supported by the repetitive story frame, in which each episode has the same format, by the use of very familiax, easy words in the narrative and in the dialogue of the real character alongside these less familiar words, e.g. Look at my bad knee, and by the vivid pictures. There is some evidence that children can learn vocabulary from stories through listening, i.e. ‘incidentally’. Elley (r989) carried out two studies with 7 and 8 year old first language users in New Zealand to investigate vocabulary gain from listening to stories, with and without teacher explanations of the new words. He found that word learning correlated significantly with the number of times the word was pictured, the helpfulness of cues to meaning in the texts, and the number of times number of occurrences of a word in the story (between 6 and 12 encounters with a new word are needed for Lz users to remember it). When story reading was accompanied by teacher explanations of new words, through pictures, acting out meaning or verbal explanation, the vocabulary gain doubled, and the gain was still evident three months later. Interestingly, there was variation in vocabulary gain across the stories used in the study, so that the story itself seems to make a difference: Elley suggests that learner involvement with a story may be what makes a difference, and lists the following as possible involvement factors in stories: humour, novelty, suspense, incongruity and vividness. Schouten-van Parreren (1989, 1992) suggests that letting children choose the stories they want to hear may help maximise the learning that takes place. 7.3.3 Alliteration Alliteration is the use of words that have the same initial consonants. For example, red riding and big bad. It can offer a source for developing knowledge of letter sounds (Chapter 6). 7.3.4 Contrast Stories for children often contain strong contrasts between characters or actions or settings. In LRRH, the innocent girl and the bad wolf are clearly contrasted characters, representing good and evil; the old woman and the young girl contrast youth and age. Placing ideas in such clear opposition may well help children’s understanding of the story as a whole. For language learning, the lexical items that are used in connec- tion with each idea will also form contrasting sets, thar may help understanding and recall (Chapter 4). 164Learning through stories 7.3.5 Metaphor In LRRH, the forest can be seen as metaphorically representing life outside the safety of the family, and the wolf as representing threats to safety and innocence. Bettelheim (1976) suggests that our early experi- ences with fairy stories map subconsciously on to our real world experiences, and become a kind of script for our lives. Claims of such power for these simple tales takes us far beyond tlie foreign language classroom, although there are gifted individuals who have used ‘story making’ for educational and personal development (e.g. Marshall 1963). 7.3.6 Intertextuality This is the term used to describe making references within one text to. aspects of other texts that have become part of shared cultural knowl- edge. For example, Red Riding Hood makes an appearance in Each Peach, Pear, Plum by Janet and Allan Ahlberg, and in Ox the Way Home by Jill Murphy (both Puffin Books). When children begin to write their own stories, or little dramas, they may, just-as adult writers do, involve familiar characters or pieces of language from stories they know. This appropriation of the voice of a writer is an integral part of first language development (Bakhtin 1981), and can help in foreign language learning too. 7.3.7 Narrative / dialogue ‘Within a story, we can distinguish two main uses of language: for narrative and for dialogue: Narrative text concerns the series of events: the little girl walked through the forest; the wolf ran to grand- mother’s house. Dialogue is use of language as it would be spoken by the characters: ‘all the better to eat you with’. Some stories are entirely narrative, e.g. Rosie’s Walk by Pat Hutchins (Puffin Books); in others, the text is entirely dialogue, with the pictures contributing the narrative as they show something different happening on each day e.g. Bet you Can’t by Penny Dale (Walker Books). Most stories, though, move between narrative and dialogue, and the way they intertwine in a story does much to create its particular atmo- sphere. Narrative and dialogue are clearly separable to listeners and readers. 165Teaching Languages to Young Learners They are distinguished by their time-frame, and hence by the tense of the verbs used: narrative language recounts what happened, and verbs are typically in the Past Tense, while dialogue captures characters ‘in their present time-frame, and uses whichever tense is appropriate to what they are talking about. Foreign language or simplified versions of stories in English often choose the simple present tense for ‘narrative (the little girl walks through the forest), probably because in EFL syllabuses it has been seen as simpler than the others and taught first. If a story is told through pictures, the present continuous tense is often found (the little girl is walking through the forest). It seems a pity to deprive learners of opportunities to hear authentic uses of past tense forms, and the contrast with other tenses, in the meaningful contexts of stories, and I can see no intrinsic reason for supposing that use of past tense would prevent children understanding a story. In fact, if they are familiar with stories in their first language, they will probably expect to hear past tense forms and may misconstrue the verbs. 7.4 Quality in stories The issue of what makes a good quality story is important but is clearly bound to be somewhat subjective. A good story is, at one level, simply one that listeners or readers enjoy. However, stories that appeal more than others, and that remain favourites with children and parents over many years, do demonstrate some common features that can be identified as characterising quality. Quality stories have characters and a plot that engage children, often the art work is as important as the text in telling the story, and they create a strong feeling of satisfaction when the end is reached. A convincing and satisfying closure includes the reader in those who ‘live happily ever after’. Children need to be able to enter the imaginative world that the story creates. This means that they can understand enough about thé char- acters and their lives to be able to empathise with them. So, a story about being lost in the desert that is to be used with children in arctic countries will need ro contain lots of detail that enables them to imagine what a desert looks and feels like to be in. Many stories for children include fantastical beings or animals in imaginary worlds, but these characters and settings usually bear enough resemblance to children and 2 My summary of LRRH eazlier in the chaprer used the Simple Present rather than the Simple Past because it was an account of the story, not a telling of the story. 166Learning through stories their real worlds for readers to imagine them: monsters tend to live in families, tigers come to drink tea in the kitchen, frogs and ducks get jealous — all act in ways familiar to children! Stories that have the qualities of content, organisation and language use that we have explored thus far are potentially useful tools in the foreign language classroom, since they have the potential to capture children’s interest and thus motivation to learn, along with space for language growth. However, not all good stories will be automatically good for language learning, and we now move to think about what is involved in choosing and using stories not just for pleasure, but for (pleasurable) language learning. 7.5 Choosing stories to promote language learning In this section, we use the features of stories described so far to set out questions that a language teacher might ask to evaluate the language learning opportunities offered by a story in order to choose stories for the language classroom. ‘Real’ books or specially written ones? In British education in the 1980s there was a move to bring what were called ‘real books’ into primary schools for teaching reading (e.g. Waterland 1985). Real books were those written by ‘real’ authors for parents to buy for children, and there was a so-called ‘golden age’ of young children’s literature in English in the 1970s and 1980s, as writers exploited the use of colour and pictures alongside simple story lines. Examples of writers producing quality books at and since that time would include John Burningham, Janet and Allan Ahlberg, Jill Murphy, and Pat Hutchins. A great part of what made for quality in these books was the skilful and often humorous interplay of pictures and text. Many of these books are suitable for use in teaching English, and I will show how they might be exploited in the next section. The reading with real books movement has mostly lost momentum now in a return to more focused literacy teaching in British classrooms (Chapter 6), but there have been some lasting effects. Teachers now make much more use of story books for teaching reading. Educational publishers followed up the idea of qualiry stories, and commissioned specially written story books to accompany and extend structured reading schemes. While not all these books are of the quality of the original ‘real’ books, they are an improvement on the unimaginative books many children faced in schools. Schemes such as Cambridge 167Teaching Languages to Young Learners Reading and Oxford Reading Tree now offer another source of stories for teachers of English as a foreign language. The questions that follow can be applied to any story book that is being considered for use in the foreign language classroom. . Will the content engage the leamers? A good story for language learning will have interesting characters that children can empathise with, who take part in activities that the learners can make sense of. The plot will be clear, but may have a surprise or twist at the end. ‘The role of the pictures in combination with the text to form the story as a whole should be considered. If the pictures are indispensable, as is often the case, then somehow there will need to be enough copies or they will need to be made big enough for everyone to see. Are the values and attitudes embodied in the story acceptable? Stories can help children feel positive about other countries and cultures, and can broaden their knowledge of the world. However, stories should be checked for values and attitudes that may not be appropriate; for example, ‘classic’ stories written some time ago may carry attitudes to women and black people that are no longer accep- table. How is the discourse organised? Stories with a structure close to the prototypical format set out in section 7.2 are likely to be most accessible to children. The characters and setting will be described. There will be a clear plot, with an initial formulation of a problem, a series of linked events, and a resolution of the problem. An element of surprise or unpredictability will add to children’s involvement with the story. , What is the balance of dialogue and narrative? The balance of dialogue and narrative in a story may influence choice, and will certainly affect the way a story is used. Dialogue in a story may lend itself to acting out and to learning phrases for conversation. Narrative may offer repeated patterns of language that will help grammar learning through noticing of new patterns or consolidation of patterns already met (Chapter 5). 168Learning through stories “How is language used? The built-in repetition of words and phrases is one of the features of stories that is most helpful for language learning. Careful analysis of the language of the text will reveal whether the repeated phrases and vocabulary will help a particular class. There may be some phrases used in the dialogue that children can appropriate for their own language use, such as ‘look at my bad knee? in the book Ox the Way Home (Jill Murphy, Puffin Books). The narrative may use words that have already been learnt, offering a chance to recycle them in a new context. What new language is used? In planning the use of a story, the teacher can identify language use and make three rough groupings: x. language that children have already met, and that will be recycled; 2. new language that will be useful for all children to learn from the story; 3. mew language that may or may not be learnt, depending on individual children’s interest. A story can include some new language in a story, but not so much that the story becomes incomprehensible. The number of new words that listeners can cope with, within one story is not clear cut; it will depend on how well the pictures and discourse organisation support the meaning of the words, how central the new words are to the plot, and the overall total of new words, which should not be too high. In preparing to use a story, mew words and phrases that are crucial to understanding the story should be pre-taught, and the support offered by pictures and context for the meaning of other new language should be checked to ensure it is adequate. If necessary, further support can be provided. Having chosen a story because it offers potential language learning opportunities, the next stage is to decide on a sequence of tasks for the classroom. 7.6 Ways of using a story Rather than present lists of activities to use with stories, I have chosen, in the holistic spirit of this chapter, to work with a. particular story, using it to illustrate how activities might be developed in line with the 169Teaching Languages to Young Learners learning principles of the book. Further ideas can be found in Ellis and Brewster (1991), Garvie (1990), and Wright (1995, 1997). 7.6.1 Evaluating the language learning opportunities of the story ° Answers to the questions from the previous section help work towards activities: ‘Real’ books or specially written ones? The story is Dizosaurs by Michael Foreman. First published in.r972, and probably aimed at 7 or 8 year old native speaker children, ir is likely to be suitable for children up to about 12 years of age. Will the content engage the leamers? The book deals with environmental issues and has a ‘message’ that we should all look after the planet because it belongs to all of us. The narrative tells a simple story of a man, who builds a rocket'to escape the polluted earth, lands on a distant star but finds it inhospitable. He then sets off again and lands back on Earth, without realising it. While he has been away, the dinosaurs have ‘woken up’ and cleaned up the pollution to create a green and pleasant land again. When the man lands back on the Earth, he thinks he is in paradise. The writer makes use of dramatic irony when readers are aware that the man is back on earth, and that the dinosaurs have cleaned it up, while he himself thinks he is on some distant star. The dinosaurs explain that he is indeed on the Earth, but that he cannot have any bit of it back, because ‘the Earth belongs to everyone’. ‘The narrative of the man’s journey is compelling, and it works on two levels: literally, he travels from Earth to star and back; metaphori- cally, he moves from ignorant polluting of the Earth to a more thoughtful awareness. The re-awakening of the dinosaurs is a powerful idea. The contrasts across the story are very strong: between man and dinosaurs, in size and in wisdom; between pollution (before) and paradise (after), emphasised by the use of colour in the pictures. There are pictures on each double page, and colour is used vividly to contrast the barren industrial wastes that man has constructed, with the paradise of flower-filled forests that he wants to own. The characters are sympathetically drawn with human-like expressions on their faces. 170Learning through stories Figure 7.x Pictures from ‘Dinosaurs’ by Michael Foreman, Penguin Books 17Teaching Languages to Young Learners Are the values and attitudes embodied in the story acceptable? The message of the need to conserve the environment is even more relevant than when the book was first published. The further message is that ‘paradise’ can be found where we are now, if we look after i it; there is no need to travel to distant stars. How is the discourse organised? The narrative is organised around the character of the man, with the initial problem being his desire to reach a far-off star. This dream partly causes the industrial pollution that he leaves behind him. We’ see the man arrive on the star and find it completely barren and empty. The story then returns to the polluted earth and the dinosaur characters are introduced. Their problem is to clean up the planet, and they are shown doing this, as the earth gradually becomes green again. The dinosaurs and the man then meet in the resolution of the narrative, and negotiate who owns the newly green earth. The closing is a kind of crescendo in the use of language and colour, and the final picture shows the man riding on a smiling dinosaur into the sunset. What is the balance of dialogue and narrative? There is a mix of, mostly, narrative and some dialogue. The ‘dialogue’ includes the man’s thonghts to himself, as he flies from earth and back again; the dinosaurs talking to each other, and the final negotiation between the dinosaurs and the man as they resolve their differences and agree to share the planet. How is language used? What new language is used? These questions will be taken together since, in the absence of real learners to relate the language to, only informed guesses about what will be new can be made. The Dinosaurs story contains a mix of simple and complex language, as these extracts show: Examples of simple language: 1. Aman stood on a hill and looked at a star. 2. Just a bill, or a tree, or a flower? The following examples are more complex in their grammar: 3. The rocket was ready, but there was nowhere for it to be launched. 172Learning through stories - 4. Sadly he looked around, but the only thing of wonder was another star, far off, in the black sky. ' Because the complex forms describe ideas that are comprehensible, they should not cause too much of a problem for children who have been learning English for 2 or 3 years, and who can grasp the content. There is plenty of scope for children to extend their English through the story. The parallelism, or repetition of grammatical patterns, that occurs across the text is likely to be helpful to language learning: 5. Grass grew high and trees grew tall. 6. Allday and all night... 7. @ jungle — alive with beautiful plants, sweet with the scent of flowers. The following examples shows a grammatical pattern which has both repeated and contrasting parts: 8. not a part of it but all of it the earth belongs to everyone not parts of it to certain people but all of it to everyone. The phrases may be leamt initially as a chunk, and will be available to be broken down later. In terms of vocabulary, the writer uses contrasting lexical sets of words that describe the pollution and the paradise. It is in these sets that the richest vocabulary is used. Once the words are listed, we can see thar the ‘pollution’ words are nouns and verbs, whereas the ‘paradise’ words are adjectives and nouns (see Table 7.1). The discoveries about the structure of the story and the use of language that are made in an initial evaluation, such as that just carried out, can suggest ways forward in designing activities around the story. 7.6.2 Language learning tasks using the story The examples from the text demonstrate the poetic nature of the writer’s choice and use of language, and for this reason, I would want to use the story orally first. Listening to the teacher read or tell a story is a useful language learning activity at any age; using story books does not have to be about teaching reading (although it can be, as we saw in Chapter 6). Listening to a story practises the ability to hold in mind the meaning of an extended piece of spoken discourse. 173Teaching Languages to Young Learners Table 7.1 Contrasting vocabulary in Dinosaurs pollution paradise NOUNS ADJECTIVES fires green factories fresh smoke new fumes alive waste beautiful rubbish siweet heaps piles NOUNS mess shoots telegraph poles blossoms iron pylons flowers forest VERBS jungle burn scent smouldered song buffed and puffed birds In the task framework of Chapter 2, the teacher telling the story would constitute the core activity of the first task, with children listening and looking at the illustrations, either sitting close enough to the teacher to see or using large versions of the pictures. The main language Jearning goal for the core activity of the task would be that the children understand enough of the story to enjoy it. As a preparation activity, before the story reading, it would be useful to introduce the ideas and some of the key vocabulary, and the contrasting ideas and lexis that run through the story offer a good place to start: Preparation activity: brainstorming vocabulary Two pictures.from the story (as in Figure 7.1) are shown to the children, one of the industrial mess and one of the green paradise, and they are asked for words about the pictures that they already know. If the children can read and write in English, then the words can be written on the board in two columns as in Table 7.1, or in two semantic networks, under the key words pollution and paradise. Children may offer words in English, or their first language, which the teacher can translate. After children have offered words, the reacher can supply a few others that will be needed to understand the story. 174Learning through stories ‘Core activity: reading the story The teacher reads the story to the children, giving them plenty of: time to look at the pictures. In the first reading, the teacher should read on through the story, rather than stopping too much to talk about words or the plot. Pictures can be used to emphasise what is happening in the story. A second reading can follow straight away. This time the teacher can pause at the end of each page to point and repeat key words or ideas, or to.ask children to recall or predict what happens next. After listening to a story, children should have the chance to respond to it. They can be encouraged to express their feelings about the story, in English if possible, using simple phrases like: Tliked it when... I thought the dinosaurs were good. Follow-up activity: vocabulary learning A simple immediate follow up would be to get the children to draw a picture as a further response to the story, and to choose and write down, some of the vocabulary from the Preparation list next to the picture. They might be asked to choose five new words that they like and are going to learn,-and take the picture home to show parents and practise their words. At the beginning of the next lesson, they can be asked to tell the words to a friend to motivate their self-directed learning. The language learning goal of the follow-up activity is much more specific: to learn the meaning of five new words and recall the words in the next lesson. This three stage task would probably take about half an hour and, in doing it, learners have only dipped a toe into the ocean of possibilities that any story offers. In the next section, I again use Dinosaurs to illustrate ideas, but also discuss possibilities more generally. 7.7 Developing tasks around a story 7.7.1 Listening skills The first encounter with a story is only the beginning of language learning work that can be done around it. If a story appeals to children, they will want to hear it again and again. Once a story has been used, it can be added to the collection in the classroom, and looked at by the 175Teaching Languages to Young Learners children in spare moments, borrowed to take home, or read again by the teacher in future lessons. The five or ten minutes spent listening to a familiar story will re-activate vocabulary and grammatical patterns, and offer opportunities for children to notice aspects of the language use that passed them by on previous readings or that they have partly learnt. In listening to a story, children are practising listening for ‘gist’, ic. the overall meaning. They can also be helped to focus on detail when the text is met on further occasions. If the teacher records the story on to cassette during one of the tellings, the recording can be used for further listening practice, at home or in class. 7.7.2 Discourse skills A story creates a world of characters who talk to each other and this discourse world presents opportunities for communicative activities and work on discourse skills. Acting roles The dialogue in a story can be separated out from the narrative, if necessary in a version simplified by the teacher, and spoken by the children who take on roles of characters. If the teacher reads the narrative and children dress up and act out the dialogue, the story becomes a performance that might entertain another class, providing useful repeated practice in the process. Rather than using all the dialogue, sections of it might be extracted for a closer focus. For example, the story contains a stretch of ‘negotia- tion’ between the man and the dinosaurs over who owns the earth. This could be practised between children taking the roles, or using puppets. Retelling the story ‘As mentioned earlier in the book, asking children to retell a story in a foreign language is a very demanding task, much more demanding than in the first language. After all, one of the advantages of stories is that they can be slightly beyond the children’s receptive level because of the support they offer to understanding. If children are to retell the story, they are asked to work at this level in production. They are unlikely to be able to do this and the experience will be difficult and perhaps de- motivating. If children are to. reproduce the whole story in some way, with its temporal sequencing, then the language demands will need to be 176Learning through stories reduced. For example, learners could be given (or draw) a set of pictures of the story (the collection of pictures produced in the follow-up to the first hearing could be used) and arrange them in order. They might then also get a set of simple sentences written on strips of card to match the pictures. The pictures and sentences could be stuck into the children’s books and used for reading. If they are not writing in English, pairs of children could work on composing a’ sentence orally for each picture and, after they have practised several times, can tell the whole class their ‘story’, using the pictures as prompts. They might reconstruct the story, orally or in writing, using much simpler text. For example: the man wanted paradise be went in a rocket he went to a star the star was empty Using the discourse of the story in other contexts Short phrases from the story may be usable in other contexts, and children may well use them spontaneously when they have heard them in the story several times. The discourse of the story may also contain sections of language use that can be extracted and focused on to develop discourse skills for other situations. For example, the story has two instances in which characters arrive and comment on what they find: . x. The dinosaurs arrive on the polluted earth, look around and comment on the mess they find: Pooh! There is nothing on this planet but mess. If we are going to live here, we'll have to get busy. 2. The man lands in a beautiful jungle and admires it: At last I have found my paradise. These evaluative comments are rather similar to the sorts of messages that people write on postcards from their holidays. To extend their repertoire of this type of discourse, children could be given a set of postcards from various places with suitable comments on to read. They then choose comments for other places, perhaps moving into the imagination: to write on postcards from Mars, from the bottom of the sea, from London or New York. A writing task linked back to the story might be to make and write a postcard that the dinosaurs and the man would send, that includes their evaluative comments. 177Teaching Languages to Young Learners - Using situations from the story as starting point The story can act as a starting point for further events, that in turn’ generate activities that practise oral or literacy skills, such as pretend interviews on cassette or video, articles for a school magazine, contribu- tions to Internet discussion sites. Here are some ways in which a story can serve as a starting point, illustrated-from Dinosaurs: ~ Characters can be transplanted to other situations, e.g. if the dinosaurs came to our school, what would they say, and what would they do? . . ~ The ‘problem’ of the story might be transferred, . e.g. what are the pollution issues in our neighbourhood? what should be done about them? — Characters can take part in events beyond the story, e.g. the man writes a diary of bis trips; the story is retold from the man’s point of view; a spokesperson for the dinosaurs is inter- viewed for TV about what happened. 7.7.3 Focused reading skills practice Some of the activities already mentioned involve reading and writing, but the development of literacy skills might not be central language learning goals in the activity. In this section, we see how stories might contribute to focused’literacy skills practice. When we looked at emergent literacy in Chapter 6 we saw how regular routinised reading of stories can be used to promote early literacy development. Large versions of stories, or ‘big books’, are very helpful to practise both top-down and bottom-up skills in reading (as per Figure 6.3). With beginning readers, big books can be used to show the direction in which books and sentences are read, to point out repeated words and syllables, or initial consonants. More advanced readers can read along with the teacher: listening and following silendy the first time, joining in the next time and eventually reading aloud individually. Just as it is useful language practice to hear a familiar story many times, so it is useful literacy skills practice to read a familiar story many times. The finding and integration of information about letters, words and sentences can become more automatic each time, and children will be motivated by feeling like fluent readers. Comprehension skills can be practised through guided prediction during the telling of the story, e.g. the teacher asks What do you think he will find when he lands? Knowledge and skills at letter-sound level can be practised by 178Learning through stories - choosing from the story repeated patterns to focus on, using the procedure ini Chapter 6. The Dinosaurs story does not have many options, apart from a number of words that contain the short vowel sound made by : cut rumble buff puff rubbish up jungle Some of the new words might also be taught as sight words, once their meaning is well established. 7.8 Summary We have seen in this chapter some of the considerations facing teachers in choosing and using stories for language learning. 1 have suggested that teachers should critically evaluate the quality and the language learning potential of stories before using them in the classroom. This requires close attention to the discourse organisation, the use of language, and the quality of the story. A writer’s use of language is central to the quality of a book, and so it is no coincidence that good quality children’s ’s stories also offer language learning opportunities. We haveexamined various ways of using children’s stories in the foreign language classroom to help the development of vocabulary and grammar, and of oral and literacy skills. To turn a children’s story book into a tool for language learning requires a teacher to deploy a tange of skills and knowledge. As we move, in the next chapter, to look at theme-based learning, we will find many of these skills required again. In language teaching and learning, stories and themes overlap at the macro-level of providing holistic learning experiences, but they also overlap at a more micro-level, where a story can provide a theme to be explored (as in some of the activities in the previous section), or where a theme can be developed through the use of stories. 1798 Theme-based teaching and learning 8.1 issues around theme-based teaching The essential notion of theme-based teaching is that many different activities are linked together by their content; the theme or topic runs through everything that happens in the classroom and acts as a connecting thread for pupils and teacher. Good theme-based teaching has produced some of the most inspiring teaching that I have ever seen; done less well, it leads quickly to chaotic and ineffective classrooms. Because it can lead to such extremes of learning experiences for children, it is worth taking a long, hard look at what makes for good theme-based teaching. Effective theme-based teaching is extremely demanding on teachers in both planning and in implementation; knowledge of a wide repertoire of activity types and resources is needed to plan for children of all abilities to be stretched and learning all the time, and to avoid children spending too long on cognitively less demanding activities, such as drawing pictures. Skilled management of class, group and pair work is needed to keep all children actively learning, even when good activities have been planned. An equality issue also can arise if teachers choose themes that they hope will keep the interest of the most demanding pupils, but then neglect the interests of quieter pupils. Knowledge of patterns of cognitive, language and motor skills development is needed to plan, ensure and evaluate progression in all areas of the curriculum through theme-based teaching over the school year. Organisational and technical skills are needed to find or create a wide range of resources. To the knowledge and skills required for good theme-based teaching, we must then add the language-using demands. that will be made on the foreign language teacher to carry out theme-based work in the foreign language. . Difficulties with maintaining progression, motivation and control, as well as a range of more politically motivated concerns about standards, have led to the demise of theme-based teaching in many schools in England, where it was a major methodology from the late 1960s on (see next section). At the same time, theme-based teaching is being espoused by Ministries of Education elsewhere around the world who are dissatisfied with the outcomes of other types of primary or elementary school curriculum. 180Theme-based teaching and learning In this chapter, the origins of theme-based teaching are briefly described, as a starting point for using: the ideas in foreign language teaching. We then look at the various stages in the process of planning teaching around a theme and investigate how to maximise language use and language learning. Examples of themes are used to show how the language learning potential ‘of theme-based teaching can be identified and offered to pupils. 8.2 Theme-based teaching of a foreign language 8.2.1 Origins and transfer to foreign language classrooms Theme-based, or topic-based, teaching has been practised since the 1960s in UK primary classrooms, where children typically spend all day with the same teacher. In this setting, different areas of the curriculum can be taught in an integrated way, without being separated into subject areas that have to be taught at ‘specific times by separate teachers. Teaching that is integrated around-a theme is claimed to better suit the way that young children naturally learn. In its original (first language) uses, theme-based teaching required teachers to choose a theme or topic, such as ‘People who help us’, and then to plan a range of teaching and learning activities related to the: theme, that incorporated aspects of mathematics, science, art, language, history, geography, music and so on. For example, children of five or six years might work with the teacher to make a list of people who help them on the way to school: parents who make the breakfast, a friend who walks with them to school, the lollipop man who helps them cross the road, the playground helper who looks after them before school begins. They could then draw pictures of each person and write their names underneath. They could then put the pictures in order on a frieze of ‘People who help us each day’. In this activity, the children would have worked on their language, literacy and art skills, and on the concept of temporal sequencing which will be needed in maths and in history. Another day they might visit the fire station to learn about how fire engines work. In the process of this activity they might cover aspects of geography (drawing a map of where the fire station-is in the town); some science (about fires, oxygen, water and chemical extinguishers); some maths {counting the engines and the personnel, working out how many go on each engine); some language work in writing a letter of thanks after- wards, and so on. With creative thinking and skilled organisation, 2 181Teaching Languages to Young Learners theme can generate a long list of activities relating to all areas of the curriculum under one theme. . Theme-based teaching has been transferred across from general primary education to the teaching of English as a foreign language (Garvie 1991; Holderness 1991; Scott and Ytreberg 1990). It offers one way of solving the problem of what to teach in primary FL classrooms, where a focus on the language itself might not be appropriate (Tongue 1991), and meshes with ideas about communicative language teaching, in that children will have opportunities to learn the foreign language through its use to carry the thematic content. The potential of theme- based teaching to provide realistic and motivating uses of the language with meaning and purpose for children is clear; the realisation of that potential requires, as in first language teaching, high levels of knowledge’ and expertise from teachers. 8.2.2 Variations on a theme In the simplest version of theme-based foreign language teaching, a topic provides content for a range of language learning activities. Halliwell (1992) goes beyond this and suggests that the links berween the foreign language classroom and other lessons at primary level can work in several directions: - other subject areas, such as math or art, can offer teaching techni- ques and activities, as well as content, that can be used in the foreign language classroom; ~ foreign language lessons can provide content for other subject areas; ~ whole subject lessons can be taught in the foreign language. This last variation edges foreign language teaching towards a partial version of immersion education, found increasingly in European schools, sometimes under the banner of ‘plurilingual’ education; for example, German pupils learning geography in English (Wode 1999) or Scottish pupils learning Maths in French (Hurreli 1999). A further variation on theme-based teaching is an ‘activity-based’ approach, for.example that developed by Vale and Feunteun (1995). In this approach, an overarching theme links the content of a lesson, and learning of language takes place as children participate in a range of activities on the theme, such as sorting, measuring and playing games. Again, many of these activities come from other curriculum areas. Figure 8.1 shows some of the many activities that can be transferred - from -other subject areas for use in the foreign language classroom (drawing on Halliwell 1992; Vale and Feunteun 1995). 182Theme-based teaching and learning comparing . finding out then NOW dra . making about people timelines a . places ra =a BrApas . using maps ti measuring ing gri surveys wp role play st = drama experiments 3 & stories testing 3 ze |. Py ae 3 poems growing things : rhymes mail composing, sequences publishing cooking collecting making ~ recipes models PUNtINE tasting Puppets masks Figure 8.1 Subject area activities to use in the FL classroom (drawing on Halliwell 1992, Vale and Feunteun 1995) Examples of lessons using very simple language to carry out activities can be found in Halliwell (1992). Vale and Feunteun suggest that activity-based approaches offer ‘whole learning / whole language experience’ in which the activities ‘are of value to the overall educational and social development of the child, and not merely to develop English language skills’ (Vale and Feunteun 1995: 28). Whole language approaches to teaching ethnic minority children have been popular in American elementary schools (e.g. Genesee 1994). Theme-based and whole language work can successfully construct meaningful learning opportunities for children, but so too can many other tasks and activities, including those discussed elsewhere in this book. The notion of ‘whole-ness’ does not only apply at the macro level of a theme across a lesson or series of lessons, but can apply to the smallest activity in which meaning, form and use are combined in social interaction: a child who needs a pencil and asks successfully for it in the foreign language has used the language in a ‘whole’ discourse event 183Teaching Languages to Young Learners | (section 3.2). Furthermore, as we have seen with the teaching of discourse skills, vocabulary, grammas, and literacy skills, there are some aspects of language that cannot fully develop without focused attention.. It is a paradox that we need to work with: that focused and partial practising may be needed for the development of macro-level holistic language skills (Widdowson 1998). 8.2.3 Choosing theme-based teaching for the foreign language classroom Theme-based teaching can be used in large or small amounts, and in varying concentrations. In concentrated form, and in skilled hands, it could replace course book and syllabus altogether. More realistically, it can be adopted for one or two lessons in a week, or for several weeks in a term, to supplement other work, and to help teachers build up the skills and knowledge that are demanded. Even when the course book is used fairly closely, theme-based ideas can provide extra activities. Many course books use topics or themes to structure their units, although this is often a superficial covering for a grammatical or functional sequencing. The title of a umit, such as ‘Pets’ or ‘My - Family’, can be treated like a theme, and adopting a theme-based approach can extend teaching and learning beyond the confines of the- text book. Foreign language teaching, in adapting ideas for theme-based teaching, should try to avoid as far as possible the kinds of problems faced by its use in first language education, mentioned in section 8.x. It is clear, although again somewhat paradoxical at first sight, that good holistic learning experiences are constructed through rigorous attention to detail in planning and teaching. As with using stories, there is no magic that can replace informed and detailed analysis and planning by the teacher. In the next section, we see how planning can move from content to language learning goals. 8.3 Planning theme-based teaching The language learning opportunities offered by theme-based teaching in the foreign language classroom arise from the content and the activities that pupils undertake. Together, the content and activities produce language-using situations and discourse types. In this section, we see how planning can move from content /activity to language use, and produce language learning goals for theme-based lessons. 184Theme-based teaching and learning 8.3.7 Advance versus ‘on-line’ planning Theme-based teaching can be tightly planned in advance, or it can be allowed to evolve ‘on-line’ through dynamic teaching and learning, that changes direction in the light of task outcomes, developing and evolving with the emerging interests of children and teacher. Like the effortless movement of skilled dancers, it would be a mistake to think that this type of teaching can take place without years of painful practice and experience. Even the expert teacher will usually need to carry out careful planning of a theme in advance, to prepare sub-themes, tasks and materials, and to identify the language learning goals of each activity. The dynamic nature of theme-based teaching can be enhanced by building in ‘choice points’, where pupils and teacher have choice over direction, activity or timing. As a theme proceeds, there may be points at which the class can decide which of two or more possible directions the theme-based work will take. In a theme-based lesson, children can be allowed to choose a fixed number of activities from a small set of activities. They can also be encouraged to take some responsibility for their owm learning by being required to organise their time. After a plenary session in which the tasks for the lesson are explained and understood, children can decide in what order to do the activities; the only constraint is that they must complete all activities within the given time, which could be the lesson or the week. To help with time manage- ment, children can copy a list of activities from the board, number them in their chosen sequence and tick them off as completed. The use of choice points contributes to children’s capacities for self-directed learning by giving them supported practice in making decisions. as learning proceeds, so that later they will be able to identify these points themselves. 8.3.2 Finding a theme Finding a theme or topic is the easiest part! A theme can come from the children’s current interests, from topics being studied in other classes, from a story (e.g. dinosaurs or conservation of the environment from Dinosaurs - Chapter 7), or from a local or international festival or event. A list from Vale and Feunteun (1995) of possible themes shows something of the range of sources: ~ Spiders and mini-creatures ~ Circus 185Teaching Languages to Young Learners ~ Potatoes / vegetables — Islands , — Bridges ‘ ~ Jack and the Beanstalk — Halloween / festivals — The House that Jack Built. Children might be given a stake in the process from the start by asking them to suggest themes, or to select a theme for the term from a list. It is necessary for staff across a school to liaise over themes, so that children do not find themselves studying the same theme more than once with different teachers. 8.3.3 Planning content Two basic planning tools for theme-based teaching are brainstorming and webs. Both techniques allow the connection of ideas in non-linear ways, reflecting the learning processes that we are aiming to produce. Brainstorming is a mental process that starts with one idea and then sparks off-others through random and spontaneous links. All possibi- lities are noted down and are then used to select from. A ‘web’ is a way of writing down ideas and connections without forcing them inte linear form as in a list or in text. The main idea or topic is put in the centre of the paper or board, and connecting ideas written around it, with lines showing connections. A web can be used in brainstorming, and / or can be used after brainstorming to put some order into the random collec- tion of ideas. In section 4.4.4, we saw that a theme can be considered as including: people + objects + actions + processes + typical events + places This notion helps start the brainstorming process. When applied to Vale and Feunteun’s theme of Potatoes, the theme spreads from farming and eating potatoes into areas of concern such as the scientific manipulation of crops and whether international businesses threaten local traditions. Figure 8.2 shows how a brainstorming around the theme might’ develop. Notice that the ideas relate mostly to non-school life and that they are still just content, not yet foreign language learning activities. 186Theme-based teaching and learning Potatoes . and - People Objects farmers types of potatoes . gardeners farming implements e.g. hoes eaters . cooking implements cooks e.g. peelers, chip pans customers Walter Raleigh (brought the potato to England from America) Actions Processes digging growing planting cooking harvesting making crisps peeling buying and selling chopping staple foods in diets chipping exploration of the New World eating how food and cooking can spread internationally genetic modification Typical events the potato harvest Places a visit to a fast food restaurant fields, restaurants Figure 8.2 Brainstorming around the thenie of potatoes To this list, we can add types of discourse typically associated with any of the above, since that will take us, via language in use, towards anguage learning. Potato-related examples of discourse would include: — menus, ordering ~ instructions on seed packets ~ recipes historical information newspaper reports on genetic modification and international busi- nesses. t The availability of texts like these in the foreign language will influence the theme planning. It is useful to build up‘a collection of authentic materials on trips and from magazines; the Internet provides a rich source of information in English. The ideas can now be grouped into sub-themes, such as Growing Potatoes; Using Potatoes; The History of Potatoes, and drawn as a web (Figure 8.3). From these sub-themes, planning can move to identifying activities and language goals. 187Teaching Languages to Young Learners | where potatoes come from types of potato Growing potatoes History of potatoes invention of chips Figure 8.3 Potato web An alternative planning procedure is to build up web linking activities to areas of the schoo! curriculum: maths, technology, etc. Figure 8.4 shows the topic web for Potatoes from Vale and Fewnteun (1995: 236). The rectangular boxes linked to each curriculum area contain school- based activities, and the outermost layer shows the language learning goals of each activity. Activities and content have, of course, to be selected to suit the age of the children. The brainstorming and webbing processes can be carried out with the children, rather than by the teacher alone. A good way to start is by asking the children for words connected to the theme, and writing these on the board, constructing a web as words are suggested. This tan be done in the foreign language, or bilingually, with the teacher translating words that children suggest in their first language. The advantage of doing this work with the children is that it also provides a quick assessment of their knowledge and interest around the topic, through the words that they suggest and through areas that they do not mention. The words that need to be translated provide a starting point for vocabulary learning goals for the theme-based teaching, since they reflect meanings that the children can and want to express, but for which they do not have the language. 188Theme-based teaching and learning ‘s Family; namiag; Comparisons & superlatives; Aa potmtoes — sogaateoat ing acetal aca wee set une 1g PuPpeES; ee size serinted, guide ialogue. lotablens: Ise, aeeet s, geolnges deroductlons, izes, Toleplay ding vegeeowl fporperd: wegeeatle shop roleplay, numbers man fair gvareee imperatives; inseevetions. invitations and replies, ts of a vehicle; ores of mevement, Figure 8.4 Topic web for Potatoes (from Vale and Feunteun 1995, p. 236) An initial brainstorm can also be used to produce guiding questions for the theme work as a whole. Children and teachers can draw up a set of questions they want to find answers to. For example, they might ‘want to find out: « how many types of potato are there? © what do sweet potatoes taste like? e where do the potatoes we eat come from? e how many kilos of chips does the class eat in a year? These (genuine) questions can guide the sequencing and content of activities. 8.3.4 Planning language learning tasks Having identified sub-themes and guiding questions by taking a ‘content perspective’ on the theme, planning now has to bring a ‘language- learning perspective’ to it, so that planning moves from content to FL classroom activities, with discourse types and aspects of language use guiding the construction of language learning tasks with clear goals and stages (as in Chapter 3). For example, finding out what sweet potatoes taste like could involve a sequence of tasks such as those shown in Figure 8.5, each using the foreign language in activities and in discourse. In this example, we continue to use activities largely drawn from the 189Teaching Languages to Young Learners . Theme: Porators Sub-Theme: WHar DO SWEET POTATOES TASTE LIKE? Tasks, Activities, and Discourse Types Task r Finding a recipe to cook the potatoes searching on the Internet for possible recipes choosing which recipe to try compiling a shopping list Task 2 Going to the supermarket to buy ingredients planning the trip noting where things come from to put on a map . making a record of the trip with photographs or video, and a spoken commentary Task 3 Cooking the recipe preparing ingredients doing the cooking recording and evaluating the process TASK 4 Tasting the results inviting other classes to taste, writing invitations conducting a taste survey and posting results on the Internet writing out the recipe for home, school magazine TASK 5 Producing a book, or video, or photo and tape record of the whole | series of events Figure 8.5 Tasks, activities and discourse types around the potato theme world outside the classroom, rather than from other subject areas in the school curriculum. The activities to be carried out by pupils sometimes generate particular types of discourse, either as sources or as outcomes in teaching and learning; these are underlined in Figure 8.5. The tasks can then be organised into stages, each with language and content goals, and fitted to the timing of lessons. Doing the whole series - of tasks might take half a term, but it might be decided just to do a reduced version of Tasks 3 and 4: Cooking and Tasting, that could be - fitted into one or two lessons. 190Theme-based teaching and learning 8.4 Leaming language through theme-based teaching 8.4.1 The language learning potential of theme-based teaching ‘The previous section shows that adopting a theme to guide planning can open up limitless opportunities. It is, necessary to select from the possibilities to match the interests of 4 particular class, and then to construct classroom tasks that will build on what pupils already know of the foreign language and extend their language learning. In this section, we look more specifically at the potential for language learning through themes. The use of the foreign language in theme-based teaching, and thus the learning potential, is largely determined by the content and activities. The language is not, as in course-book lessons, selected in advance as a set of language items to be taught. As the previous section emphasised, careful planning can predict and help maximise some possibilities, but there will still be a degree of unpredictability about the language that will arise in theme-based activities such as understanding recipes found on the Internet or preparing and cooking food. The teacher is required to be very sensitive to the language, both to predict language use in advance and to make the most of the unpredictable uses of the language. Children may need support to understand content, and, when useful language items do occur unexpectedly, the teacher needs to be able to seize the opportunity and help children to notice and use the language. As we have progressed chapter by chapter through the book, we have seen that the language learning of children is likely to revolve around chunks of discourse leat from talk, stories and songs, vocabulary development, and some aspects of (mostly implicit) grammatical knowl- edge, together with elementary literacy skills. Early foreign language learning can be much more ‘organic’ in its development than the linear syllabuses of many secondary course books, graded by grammar or function. Theme-based teaching can contribute to this organic develop- ment from partial to more complete knowledge by building links and connections in the networks of children’s language resources. 8.4.2 Learning vocabulary Theme-based work is likely to introduce new vocabulary items, with the theme providing support for understanding and recall. Vocabulary items that have already been introduced in the course book may be met again in the new context of a theme, and the encounter will reinforce the words or phrases while also adding new meaning aspects to them. Some recent evidence for the benefits of this type of teaching for rorTeaching Languages to Young Learners vocabulary learning comes from the use of a foreign language as a medium of instruction in German schools (Wode 1999). Twelve-year- old pupils taught geography through English, after two years of learning EFL as a subject, were tested on the vocabulary through oral production tasks. In comparison with students who had not had English-medium teaching, the ‘partial immersion’ students used larger vocabularies with a wider range of items and more synonyms. Their vocabularies also contained more words that could-not be traced back to their English course book or to the task instructions; these words probably came from the teacher talk during subject learning. Wode claims that teaching content through the foreign language offers more opportunities for incidental vocabulary learning than teaching the foreign language as a subject. 8.4.3 Language learning through ‘communicative stretching’ Theme-based teaching can produce moments when pupils’ (and some- .“ times teachers’) language resources are stretched to their limit. Sup- ported by meaningful content, children may be able to work out the meaning of new or unfamiliar language, or, motivated by real interest.in a topic, they may struggle to communicate their knowledge to someone else, as we saw the Norwegian pupil doing when talking about his budgie in Chapter 3. Stretching resources in this way pushes the child into the ZPD (Chapter 1) and can be very productive of learning. One particular process that occurs in communicative stretching is the grammaticisation of language learnt earlier as formulaic phrases or chunks (section 5.3.1). In situations where language resources are stretched, children may need to break down chunks of language, previously learnt as wholes, into their elements, recombining the parts to create new phrases that convey the child’s meaning. 8.4.4 Learning discourse skills Working with an increased range of discourse types A real benefit of theme-based learning is that it offers a natural use for a wider range of discourse types, both spoken and written, than is usually found in a course book. Themes can include different aspects of the same topic that each require different types of discourse. Potatoes in the above example (Figure 8.4) will be talked and written about as science, as histocy and as cookery, using and producing informational discourse, the discourse of scientific reports, recipes and a range of spoken language across the different activities. Even at a very simple level of 192Theme-based teaching and learning language, children can begin to experience these different types of discourse. : s School-based activities, such as those in Figure 8.1, also produce a range of discourse types, such as graphs, charts, reports, and commen- taries. Some of these are pre-cursors and foundations of subject-specific discourses that children will become familiar with at secondary level, and for those situations where children will study some or all of their subjects through the foreign language, early experiences with these types of discourse will support their later studies. Using information texts, on paper and on computer Texts that can be used in theme-based teaching will include relevant songs, rhymes, video, stories, and non-fiction informational texts, including sources accessed through the Internet or on CD-ROM, catalogues, leaflets and magazines, and educational materials written for native speaker children. Informational text types provide language learning opportunities that go beyond those of the narrative or story. For example, an information book contains organisational feattres such as a contents page, an index, headings and sub-headings. The text itself is likely to include short self-contained chunks of information, often around pictures or diagrams. The different types of writing ~ introduc- tion, description, narrative, argument, summary - will use grammar and vocabulary in different ways from stories. Information books can be used as resources for finding out specific information or as starting points for a theme. They offer opportunities to see the language used for these purposes and to develop reading skills at text level. They also provide a model for writing information texts in the foreign language. Using the computer to access information practises the use of key words and skimming techniques in ‘surfing the net’. On each screen, a choice must be made about where to go next and this is done by reading what is available and comparing the possibilities to the user’s current goal. Once chunks of text are reached, then the user needs to read the first few sentences and scan the rest in order to decide whether it is worth more intensive study. Children are likely to pay more attention to images than to text, using the information provided by the images to support understanding of the text. We need to know much more about how children ‘read’ information on computer, but it would seem helpful to surf for specific information, having discussed in advance and agreed on ‘guiding questions’. The computer search then becomes a task with specified outcomes, such as a verbal report back on what was found in answer to the questions. , : Instead of children surfing the net, teachers can find useful sites in 193Teaching Languages to Young Learners advance that they direct children to or can download information into computer files that children can then access without needing to be on line. Pages from the computer can be printed our and used as paper-- based text. , 8.4.5 Motivation to precision in language use When communicating with others about a theme, it can become more important to communicate precisely and accurately. Precision in lan- guage use involves learners selecting and adapting their language resources to say or write exactly what they mean; accuracy, the term more often used in the literature, refers to using the language correctly relative to the target form. Precision is thus user-oriented, whereas. accuracy is language-oriented. Often, of course, precision requires accuracy, but it always requires more than that; ic requires learners to access and use the language that will best express their personal mean- ings, and may further require negotiation with others to ensure that they understand the meanings as intended. 8.4.6 Outcomes and products from theme-hased fearning Theme-based work lends itself to the production of displays and performances of various sorts that, because they will have an audience, motivate children fo re-write, practise or rehearse towards a polished language performance or text. As a theme proceeds, children will produce pieces of work - poems, pictures and sentences, reports, graphs and so on. These can be saved by each child in a personal folder for the theme. As a final stage in the theme, the pieces of work are gathered together to make a record of what has been covered for the children and for other people. Various modes and media are possible: Big books produced by the class or by groups of children. ® A magazine or newspaper, with articles and pictures around sub- themes, compiled by the class and photocopied for parents and other classes. © Visual display on the classroom walls or school notice board: a frieze, sets of pictures and headings, pieces of writing, posters. © Video, with spoken commentary. Performance: acting out a story or presenting a documentary-type report. e Computer record: web pages constructed around the theme and put on the schoo! web site; CD-ROM with video and text. 194