DIDACTICS I

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Newsletter 10 12^th November 2001

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Universidad Tecnológica Nacional

Instituto Nacional Superior del Profesorado Técnico

Cátedra de Didáctica Especial del Primer y Segundo Ciclo de la EGB

Profesores:  Omar Villarreal, Fernando Armesto, Claudia Alvarez.

& Adriana Lauri.

Instituto Superior de Formación Docente Nro 41 – Adrogué.

Profesor : Omar Villarreal

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"Start by doing what's necessary, then what's possible and suddenly you are doing the impossible."
Saint Francis of Assisi

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Dear All,

Unbelievable. Last two weeks of classes. Or rather, our last week of classes since next week will be devoted exclusively to our parcial and make-up. This is precisely why the summaries of your individual micro-presentations are so welcomed. Here is a bunch of them. Unluckily many are missing… and I cannot do much about it. I can only promise to publish the ones that you send in the next few hours. We, teachers too get into the turmoil of a working week and it is often hard to find the time for a posting.

A big hug to you all

Omar Villarreal

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Lidia Frumento

Ali are you a boy or a monster?

Drama helps adults to learn English as a foreign language and primary children too.It helps to incorporate the English.

It is difficult for many children to participate in a listening activity because they have to discriminate sounds. Also because of the speed of delivery, length of utterance and time allowed for assimilation.

A listening activity in which children have to give the teacher a verbal response is called rhythm and sound. The teacher claps her hands following the rhythm of a song the children (ages 6 to 10) are familiar with and they have to guess the title of the song.

Children have to give the teacher a verbal response,this listening activity is called syllabification.Children (ages 11 to 12) have to separate in syllables words that the teacher says.

Children follow instructions(give a physical response),for example point to the blackboard.This is another listening activity (ages 6 to 12).

There are talking activities in which children describe puppets or are descibed by others after they dressed up.This activities can be done by children that are 8 years old and older children.

Conversation,another talking activity in which chidren play freely with puppets, cars, dolls etc.There is another activity(conversation) called

foreign shopper.A child as the foreign shopper, who is helped by other children, tries to convey his/her wants to the shop keeper.This activities are for children that are between 6 and 10 years old.

Another talking activity (conversation) for children that are at least 10 is interviewing in pairs.The information gathered can lead to class statistics.

There is another activity called charades.The teacher chooses a category (for example: coulors, foods, animals etc).Afterwards the teacher divides the class in groups.Each group chooses a word and perfoms it.

Preparing a radio show could be a culmination of talking activities after a term.The teacher encourages the brainstorming of ideas.Then the teacher divides the class in small groups.Each group discusses what they want to say and what they need to be able to prepare it.

Children can also take part in an improvisation.An improvisation is a roleplaying activity centered around a dramatic incident or series of incidents as in a story.In an improvisation there is no script.Improvisations can be done with puppets (children using puppets retell a story),stories or folk tales.So that chidren take part succesfully in an improvisation several steps should be followed :

1) Teacher tells the story.

2) Questions establish if gist (main points) of the story is understood.

3) Teacher tells the main points and the children act them out.

4) Children are divided in groups to tell the story.

5) Teacher circulates around the class while the children are working.

6) Each group performs in front of the other groups.

7) Discussion of strengths and weaknesses after the performance.

Steps six and seven are followed only after the children have had considerable practice.

Children for the end of the year concert can perform an improvised play or an improvised puppet play.It is better for them to perform an improvised play than a scripted play (the script should be a guide) because children are more involved.

To perform a scripted play in a succesful way several steps should be followed:

1) The teacher tells the story and says who will play each role.

2) The teacher retells the story and the actors have to say what follows.

3) The actors tell the story while the teacher acts it out.

4) The teacher corrects emphasis and entonation while actors read and also their movements are worked out.

5) Rehersal without a script and mistakes are corrected.

6) Full acting of the play without script and without stopping.

7) Full acting of the play and mistakes are only mentioned.

8) Performance.

Ali are you a boy or a monster?

Listening activities difficult for children sound discrimination

Verbal response speed of delivery

rythm and sound (6 to 10) length of utterance

sylabification (11 to 12)

Physical response

instructions (6 to 12)

Other activities radio show plays improvised charades

Scripted script

guide

Talking activities conversation foreign shopper (6 to 10)

free play with puppets (6 to 10)

interviewing in pairs

(10 upwards)

Description with puppets (8 to 12)

dress up (8 to12)

Improvisation roleplaying activity

no script

stories and folk tales

puppets

Patricia Fernandez

English as a foreign language at primary level: the search for content.

Ray Tongue.

In this paper, Ray Tongue makes a distinction between FORM and CONTENT and states the importance of the latter in the teaching and learning of a foreign language. He even states his own experience as a learner of French as a foreign language. He says that he was taught with a grammar-based method, which focuses on forms rather than content. As a result, he knows about the target language, that is the knowledge of the grammar of French, but he is unable to use French for any meaningful purpose.

If many primary school children fail to learn “how to mean” in English, this may be related to the fact that much of the English they encounter is essentially meaningless.

Language has been designed for communication. So language learning is more likely to be successful if it is used for what it has been designed: communication. This may be achieved through content rather than form. That is, using the language for meaningful purpose, to convey information and taking into account the learner’s interests and motivation. Learners are not taught grammatical rules directly but are left to induce the rules from their use of language.

Meaningless situation: Meaningful situation:

- Are you married? - The pattern can be practised throw a guessing game

- Sue is younger than her mother. (children may bring pictures of famous people).

- The Sun is bigger than the Earth.

- Comparison of children according to their height.

To practise or teach the first patterns in class is not meaningful at all. All the children are single and younger than their parents.

Uncommunicative situation Communicative situation

- Can you walk? - Can you swim?

- Can you jump? - Can you ride a horse?

A situation is really communicative when there is an information gap, something that has to be filled, an element of uncertainty. If we ask our students if they can walk or jump, their replies are unlikely to be filling any gap because we surely know that they can. So no communication takes place, even if the student takes the trouble to answer.

Nevertheless, sometimes some strategies that might not be very communicative have to be used because they are effective to construct language. For instance that pattern “are you married” may not have been acquired , so we may practise it through a drilling, with a game: we hand out pieces of papers with and S (single) or an M (married), and the children ask one another if they are married or single. They answer according to the paper they have.

When language courses are designed for specific purposes, it is likely that the course will be successful. The content of language courses has to be organized in relation to the functional range of the language in question in the society concerned. English is the language of science and technology. Science is international; furthermore, in many languages the scientific vocabulary has borrowed from English. So the author suggests that the syllabus in science should be taught in English in the primary school.

Learner’s motivation makes teaching and learning easier and more pleasant. There are different kinds of motivation:

Instrumental motivation: it refers to wanting to learn a language because it will be useful for certain “instrumental” and practical goals, such as getting a job, reading foreign newspapers, passing an exam or obtaining a promotion. Topics such as public transport, clothing worn in other lands, countries of the world, postal and telephone services, air transport, newspapers, T.V., could be taught through the instrumental language.

Integrative motivation: it refers, on the other hand, to wanting to learn a language for reasons of understanding, relating to or communicating with the people of the culture who speak it.

Studies on this matter have concluded that students with integrative type of motivation achieve better results.

Another distinction, perhaps more useful for teachers, is that between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is the urge to learn a foreign language for its own sake, which is very typical of young children and tends to deteriorate with age. Extrinsic motivation is derived from external incentives. May be peer-group influences, the desire of students to please their parents or their wish to succeed in an external exam.

It is the teacher responsibility to motivate learners and invest quite a lot of effort in doing so. Some strategies that may be useful are the following:

Visuals: it is important for learners to have something to look at that is eye-catching and relevant to the task in hand.

Games: they provide pleasurable tension and challenge through the process of attaining some “fun” goal while limited by rules.

Play acting : role play and simulations that use the imagination and take learners out of themselves, can be excellent, though some people are inhibited and may find such activities intimidating at first.

Varied topics and tasks: topics and tasks should be varied and selected carefully to be as interesting as possible.

Personalization: learners are more likely to be interested in tasks that have to do with themselves: their own or each other’s opinions, tastes, experiences, suggestions.

Entertainment: it produces enjoyment, which in its turn adds motivation. For example:

- Songs: they are useful because they might create pre-fabricated routines or patterns. These are chunks of language that are included in songs. Children might recognize and use them because children remember songs.

- Story telling: we’d rather choose fantastic stories because they develop creativity. Concrete reference (pictures or real objects) are of utmost importance.

With all these methods, the use of language is much less tightly controlled and children acquire the language through playing.

According to the author, the excessively strict control of language is the main reason for the dull and uninteresting nature of much primary language teaching material.

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María Ines Spinelli

What is good primary practice?

A paper about the basic principles of good primary practice and what it involves by Jean Brewster.

As teachers we need constant reflection on what we are trying to achieve in teaching English to young learners and how we must best approach its implementation.

What is good primary practice?

The fields of education, psychology and applied linguistics offer us some theoretical perspectives in order to answer this question.

For Nunan the general education theory and research to language teaching are useful tools to help us to decide what and how to teach.

How children think and learn?

Primary education has generally been influenced by:

Piaget: All children pass through a series of stages before they construct the ability to perceive, reason and understand in rational, mature terms. This view has led to the concept of “learning readiness”. (He related the child’s development with biology)

Vigotsky: Before children manipulate abstract concepts he says that it should be established deep connections with concrete concepts. Language gives structure and directs the processes of thinking and concept formation, it helps the child to form a system to represent the world. The speech helps to form the higher mental processes: the ability to plan, evaluate, memorize and reason. (He related the child’s development with society)

Bruner: Learning development takes place through the processes of social interaction. He introduced the concept of LASS (Language Acquisition Support System), it is that for language development there needs to be a child component, adult support and help component. (He related the child’s development with instruction).

How have these theories influenced primary classrooms?

The main features of primary practice in Britain between the 1960s and 1980s, were derived to some extent from theories can be listed as follows.

Teacher autonomy.

A child-centred curriculum methodology.

Individualised learning.

A topic-based approach.

A methodology of “learning by doing”.

These theories have strongly influenced primary classrooms in Britain. Nowadays, the traditional “child-centred” primary education is being replaced for what the National Curriculum Council calls “good primary practice”. Some of the suggestions that the Council makes are very difficult to put into practice for example in large classes though teachers should ensure that every child has the opportunity to speak English.

A definition of “good primary practice”:

Using language to make, receive and communicate meaning, in purposeful contexts.

An “apprenticeship” approach to acquiring written and oral language, in which the adult represents the “success” the child seeks and yet offers endless help.

Maximum encouragement and support, errors are mastered.

Working on tasks which the children have chosen and which they direct for themselves.

Employing a variety of forms with a clear awareness of audience.

Working with teachers who are themselves involved in the processes-albeit with special expertise-as talkers, listeners, readers and writers.

Reading literature for enjoyment, responding to it critically and using that reading for learning.

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FELDMAN, Santiago Matías

AN INTEGRATIVE APPROACH WITH YOUNG LEARNERS

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING (ELT)

METHODOLOGY BASED ON LANGUAGE, TEACHING AND LEARNING

SELECTED UNDERLYING ISSUES

Language: 2 issues: 1- structure (grammar, sound system) ‘linguistic picture’

- use (function, purpose) ‘communicative picture’

2- language skills: listening receptive

reading literacy

speaking oracy

writing productive

Learning: 3 issues: 1- link between language, thought and experience

2- different kinds of learning

discovery type acquisition (exposure)

learning conscious (learning)

fluency

accuracy

3- progression of learning

5 stages

identification naming of objects,

etc.

getting qualification attributes

of relation compare and contrast

concepts classification putting into sets or

categories

using manipulation the learner can move

of into the past, future

concepts or possible

Teaching: 3 issues: 1- double bill for the teacher communicative (use)

linguistic (form)

2- progression of learning (from the teacher’s standpoint)

3- moving from the known to the unknown in the child’s

general experience

The teacher should cash in on the assets the children bring so that they can be used to enhance the new learning

THE APPROACH

Focus on integration

Most teachers of young learners are children orientated

rather than

subject orientated

Linking of language work with all the other work

(language across the curriculum)

L2 foreign language (EFL) i.e. children learning English in Germany

Second language (ESL) i.e. immigrants in a British school

EFL situation ESL situation

use of the growing awareness

of the children in other

subjects

integration of subject content and L2

needs more focus on needs more focus on

structure communication

Integration of L1 with L2 and L others in school policies

THE METHODOLOGY

3 main functions stimulus and motivator

vehicle carrying language, learning and teaching

instrument of integration

In general

Catch your theme careful selection, often best done by the children

themselves

which parts of the curriculum are to be pervaded

how long the work should go on

the theme must provide for the two sides of the

language equation: form and use

the importance of Story beginning, middle and end

and lots of other staging posts in between

A particular example

EFL class, 25 pupils, lower primary school

A baby has just come to the home of one of the children

The teacher approaches her coleagues and draws them into her

Planning

Interested parents are invited to come to school to observe

and/or participate

Reminders for the teacher

Build up a resource bank of potential themes

of potential materials

Have a strategy know your field

pervade the field with your theme

find skilful ways of loading

Package your themes this concerns teachers working together

Try to package a theme that has worked well,

to share it with other teachers, even in

other schools

CONCLUSION

It is recognised that many teachers in various parts of the world are not able to work with others, for whatever reason. This and other constraints may make the use of the methodology difficult. But at the same time, where there is the will the way can often be found.

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Silvia Cordi

Listening and the young learner

A paper of listening from a practical perspective by Jean Brewster

Children spend a large part of their time listening, to the teacher, to each other to prerecorded material, so teachers must prepare children for listening. It is important to teach how to listen and this can be achieved in several ways:

a) By making explicit the reasons for listening: If children know what they will be expected to do while or after listening they can focus on the most important part of the message. Setting a specific task, which may contain written or visual support, is very useful. Example: A drawing according to the listening or draw a picture after listening a description.

b) By equipping children with strategies: Such as listening to follow instructions, explanations or descriptions.

c) By emphasizing that children are not expected to understand or remember every word.

d) By encouraging pupils to exercise intelligent guesswork: Using background knowledge or context clues, such as pictures to make sense of what they hear.

Teachers need to actively support their pupil’s understanding.

Two approaches to listening

1) Ancillary (auxiliary) listening: Listening as part of a set of activities that are integrated with other skill work. Ex.: Children might listen to a dialogue with a specific grammar purpose.

2) Autonomous listening: Listening as part o f a set of activities, which may not necessary be closely integrated with children’s other language learning.

Three approaches of how children learn a foreign language:

a) Language as a linear process which considers that listening provides the learner with confidence in speaking. These two skills will provide the background for reading and writing skills. Language content of the listening is dully monitor at the student current level. This is a limited approach since listening can only be linked to speaking.

b) Language learning as a comprehension-focused process where listening may be regarded as the primary source of language experiences. Language content of listening at a slightly higher level than the current children stage.

This is a limited approach since listening is linked to the performance of certain actions.

c) Learning as an integrative process: Four skills are developed in parallel. In this method learners are encourage to make connections between skills so practice in one can reinforce the other. This is a holistic view of the learning.

What is effective listening?

Language comprehension is seen as a part of an interaction process with three main dimensions of interaction:

• The social: Maintaining relationships- exchanging information.
• The cognitive: Interaction of ideas.
• The linguistic: The way participant interpret, predict and summarized components of the spoken message.

If children are able to analyze different kinds of information in their first language, they will have the ability to transfer some of these skills and strategies to their second language. The kind of information sources can be summarize in:

a) Knowledge about the content of the spoken message:

• General knowledge to do with fact or information
• Social cultural knowledge: To do with topic, setting and participants in interaction.
• Procedural knowledge: About how language is used. Ex.: Knowing that questions demand responses.

b) Knowledge about the language used in the spoken message:

• Recognition of items of vocabulary and sentence patterns
• Understanding of phonological features such as stress, intonation and sounds.

As listeners must deal with all these kind of knowledge they have to select, interpret, summarize input so they are very active participants in interpreting the spoken test.

Finally, the role of teachers is to encourage children to draw upon different information sources, skills and strategies in order to learn how to help them understand.

It is important for that to include interactive or specific listening task with different strategies, such as follows:

1) Getting the general picture: Listen only to get a general idea of what the story is about.

2) Predicting: Children can be encourage to predict and then check when they hear to see if there is coincidence with expectations

3) Extracting specific information: May be fill in a tick chart or recognizing specific verbs and nouns when matching pictures with events in a story. Support material (such as charts or pictures) help learner understand and distinguish relevant information.

4) Inferring opining or attitude: Children can infer whether a character is sad, happy or angry analyzing the grammatical patterns, stress and intonation and therefore trying to work out some of the context of the story.

5) Working out meaning from the context: As students are not expected to understand every word from the context, it is useful to explain key words beforehand. It may be given with visual support or written frameworks.

6) Recognizing discourse patterns and makers: It is important to follow for example story telling conventions ¨Once upon a time….¨¨ to help students understand the sequence of a text as well as the right intonation and the sequence markers such as: First, then and next.

Developing a task based methodology with children:

The most complete definition of task is neatly described by Ur (1981) who writes, “each ask consists of a thinking process and its outcome in the form of a ramification of a conflict: The results must be written down, ticked off (checked), listed, sketched or tape-recorded in some way”. This definition sees tasks as process outcome orientated.

When referring to a task, it is important to make a distinction between teaching and testing of listening. The practice of asking children to listen to something with no support other than question to answer after listening has many drawbacks. It concentrates too much on the testing of comprehension or memory rather than encouraging children to develop strategies for coping with the spoken message. This kind of methodology tends to overload the child’s capacity for processing and retaining information. Thus the emphasis is placed on assessing what the children have understood rather than in supporting their understanding so that they can show that they have understood.

It is only when teachers direct the children’s attention to the purpose of the listening task before hand and provide a suitable framework for providing access to the spoken message that they can be said to be teaching listening. Possible frameworks can be pictures, charts or question that aim to create interest and supply motivation and support for the successful completion of the task. In this methodology there is a form of interaction between the listener and the text. The meaning the children construct in this process depends on their set to the text (which is the schematic knowledge such as the background knowledge, feelings, attitudes or interest), on the content (vocabulary and grammar, as well as discourse features such as reference, lexical relations, logical connectors and intonation) and the language in the text (it may be referred to people, animals, places objects, feelings) which with the help of the teacher, who creates a context and purpose for listening, will contribute to the comprehension.

Creating a listening purpose

The interaction between the listener and the text is generally achieved by thinking of the teaching of comprehension as having three phases:

Pre-listening activities: The first stage is an introduction or orientation to the text during which the teacher might elicit what the children already know about a topic, by asking them questions or creating interest by relating aspects of the content to the children’s own experiences. It is a good idea to introduce key vocabulary or grammatical items contained in the spoken text.

While-listening activities: The second stage involves an explanation of the purpose of the listening task so that the children are quite clear what their role is and whether they need to focus on specific aspect of the text.

Post-listening activity: The third stage is concerned with checking information by asking question (oral or written) or by asking for feedback on any other outcome the learners may have produced, such as completing a game, finding the correct sequence of events or drawing and labeling a picture.

Listening can serve different purposes, such as:

Listening and language awareness: This includes listening for enjoyment, listening to improve concentration, attention span, attitude, etc.

Listening to reinforce conceptual development: Listening to stories, description, to develop concepts of size, shape etc.

Listening to develop specific language points and interactional skills:

- Listening and pronunciation including recognition of sounds, stress and rhythm, aspects of intonation.

Ex. Listening to songs and rhymes can be used to develop a sense of rhythm by encouraging children to clap to the beat or to underline the stressed words in a song. Action rhymes also encourage children to listen and mime and activity. Also the rhyme could also focus on a particular phonetic sound.

- Recognizing and selecting words, grammatical patters or discourse features.

Ex: Guessing games can be used to practise different kinds of question forms while memory games where the children repeat sentences and add extra items or modify them are useful for practicing new vocabulary items.

- Listening to understand specific language function such as description, description of processes, explanations and instructions.

- Listening to collaborate with peers, i.e. interpreting other’s points of view, negotiating meaning by asking for clarification, checking information, etc.

Examples of games and other activities for the While-listening task:

1) Performing actions: This activity generally takes the form of a song, rhyme and games in which children are required to follow instructions. Small children enjoy especially those which encourage them to join in. Ex; Head, and shoulders, knees and toes or Simons says.

2) Drawing: A simple task is Dot-to-Dot where children listen to instruction to join up dots to form a picture. A more difficult task would be to draw a monster or a robot as it is being described.

3) Guessing: There are a wide variety of games for example guess the animal where the teacher gives one child a picture an the other children have to ask questions to find out which animal it is. Only yes/no answers can be given, for example, Does it have four legs? Does it have stripes? The picture given to the student could provide certain key prompts on the back to help him/her reply. The language focus on this activity is practice in listening for details and inferring information. Another guessing game involves a feely bag full of objects which children feel without seeing. They describe an object they can feel while the rest of the class try to guess what it is.

4) Matching: The traditional game for matching is Bingo. Other activities could be selecting pictures of the items described in a story or a description, ex. Describing a visit to the zoo might include a selection of animals; in this case the children are asked to select the appropriate picture of the animal and put it in the correct cage on a zoon plan while they listen. In this way the focus would be on adjectives and nouns describing parts of the animals bodies and preposition for describing location.

5) Sequencing: Stories or short descriptions are a rich source of listening for this type of activity; it could be done either in pictorial form or by listening to and reading section of the story to order the events.

6) Transferring information: In this case children may listen to a set of information, for example description of people, animals and places and either complete a tick chart or matrix, fill in details on a graph or fill in boxes on a flow char. This can be done interactively, with pairs of children asking each other question and listening for the answer or as a whole class or group activity with prerecorded material.

7) Problem solving: This is best done in pairs or groups of four either with prerecorded material or by reading out. Examples include:

- Listening to a story and choosing the written statement from a set of four which summarized the story most accurately

- Listening to a description and choosing four or five items from a list which you need.

- Predicting the next item in a story or description from a set of choices: Children are given different written statements from which they predict the most likely outcome and then it is checked by listening to the text.

The role of the teacher in supporting listening with understanding:

Teacher needs patience, imagination and skill to create an interesting environment for young learners to develop confidence in listening. The teacher should:

- Plan for listening and choose the appropriate text and tasks

- Provide support and vary the learning context

- Be creative

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