Structuring Fun for Young Learners in the ELT Classroom: Practical ideas and advice for teaching English to children to engage and inspire them throughout their primary schooling 1913414531, 9781913414535

Table of contents :
Cover
Imprint
Also available from English Teaching professional
Contents
Introduction
Part 1
Chapter 1: Working with groups of young learners – the basics
Chapter 2: Classroom management – some more little tricks
Chapter 3: What is creative young learner teaching?
Chapter 4: Language content 1 – Teaching words and sentences
Chapter 5: Language content 2 – Scripting events
Part 2
Chapter 6: Exploring fun 1 – Novelty objects
Chapter 7: Exploring fun 2 – Using space, our senses and time
Chapter 8: Exploring fun 3 – Playing with text and truth
Chapter 9: Exploring fun 4 – Movement and moving tasks
Chapter 10: Task design for games, stories and crafts
Chapter 11: Personalisation and agency
Chapter 12: The massive potential of clips and images
Chapter 13: Themed lessons – Potatoes, turmeric and stickers
Chapter 14: Providing support in the classroom
Chapter 15: Making better use of the coursebook
Chapter 16: Observed lessons and professional development
Bibliography

Citation preview

Structuring Fun for Young Learners in the ELT Classroom © Pavilion Publishing & Media The author has asserted his rights in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988) to be identified as the author of this work. Published by: Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd Blue Sky Offices Cecil Pashley Way Shoreham by Sea –West Sussex BN43 5FF

Tel: 01273 434 943 Email: [email protected]

Published 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing of the publisher and the copyright owners. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-913414-53-5 Pavilion Publishing and Media is a leading publisher of books, training materials and digital content in mental health, social care and allied fields. Pavilion and its imprints offer must-have knowledge and innovative learning solutions underpinned by sound research and professional values. Authors: Chris Roland Editor: Penny Hands Production editor: Mike Benge, Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd Cover design: Phil Morash, Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd Page layout and typesetting: Anthony Pitt, Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd Printing: CPI Anthony Rowe

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Contents Introduction..................................................................................................... 7 Part 1................................................................................................................17 Chapter 1: Working with groups of young learners – the basics................19 Chapter 2: Classroom management – some more little tricks...................41 Chapter 3: What is creative young learner teaching?.................................63 Chapter 4: Language content 1 – Teaching words and sentences..............79 Chapter 5: Language content 2 – Scripting events.....................................99 Part 2..............................................................................................................123 Chapter 6: Exploring fun 1 – Novelty objects............................................125 Chapter 7: Exploring fun 2 – Using space, our senses and time..............143 Chapter 8: Exploring fun 3 – Playing with text and truth.......................161 Chapter 9: Exploring fun 4 – Movement and moving tasks.....................183 Chapter 10: Task design for games, stories and crafts..............................207 Chapter 11: Personalisation and agency...................................................235 Chapter 12: The massive potential of clips and images............................257 Chapter 13: Themed lessons – Potatoes, turmeric and stickers...............273 Chapter 14: Providing support in the classroom.......................................299 Chapter 15: Making better use of the coursebook.....................................321 Chapter 16: Observed lessons and professional development .................339 Bibliography.................................................................................................361

Acknowledgements A teacher is not a teacher without classes. It would have been impossible to write this book without my regularly scheduled lessons. However, it would also have been impossible to fit in all the teacher training that has also fed into it without such huge co-operation from Elspeth Pollock, Director of Studies at ELI, Seville, as well as Catt Boardman and Chemi Fernandez, who organised the substitutions needed. I would especially like to thank Simon Pearlman at Active Language, and Linda Fergusson and Jude McGovern at ELI for being my Centre Directors during the periods in which I feel I really started to hit my stride teaching younger learners – leading to this volume. A very big thanks to MªÁngeles Aparicio, secretary and administrator at our ELI centre in Triana, for her support contacting parents. ¡Lo agradezco mucho! Thanks also to Christina Jones for helping to track down the parents of children appearing in the older photographs. The images in this book span a decade, so her help was invaluable. The decision to include images of students in action was carefully considered. I hope the reader can see that those included were chosen because they help convey the mood of young learner teaching described, while complementing textual accounts of activities. Thanks to the parents of all the children who appear in them for granting permission to reproduce them here. As well as Els and Catt, I would like to thank my remaining fellow trainers at ELI: Roisin O’Farrell and Enda Scott. Being part of this fivestrong, in-house team has been a highly rewarding experience. Thank you to Richard Johnson, founder of ELI, for his continued support. Thanks also to Bridget Buckley for her ongoing positivity. Bruce Javes, senior teacher for the BC in Syria gave me my first chance to train young learner teachers in Aleppo, and I thank him greatly for that. Nicola Meldrum at Oxford TEFL was the first person to give me the chance to train young learner teachers online, and the Diploma YL module that I run has allowed me to explore various areas that have formed the basis of articles and chapters in this book.

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On the subject of articles, I will be forever thankful to Helena Gomm for giving me a place in English Teaching professional magazine to publish my pieces, several of which formed the basis of chapters in this book. Thank you to Penny Hands for the amount of care and consideration with which she edited the various drafts of the book. Her suggestions were wonderful and you will enjoy it more because of her. Finally, an enormous thanks to Kirsten Holt at Pavilion for her kindness and enthusiasm at every step of the journey – from my initial proposal for the work right through to the writing and editing stages and beyond. Kirsten, cheers!

Dedications If something works for me, I will do it again. This applies both inside and outside the classroom and, I think, is worth adopting as a general principle. Accordingly, I would like to dedicate this methodology book to the same three people to whom I dedicated the last one – but for slightly different reasons.

Raquel Lía Gorosito Villalobos Your presence here includes photographs you have taken, numerous ideas coming out of our conversations, and Henry the cuddly toy. Thanks for all of that but thank you more for having faith in me as a writer and a practitioner. Often you were the first person to take one of these ideas, try it out and come back with encouragement and a way to make it better. The thanks get bigger. You have my eternal gratitude for sharing space with the man-machine I became for the last year and a half – tapping away like a loon in the living room, day after day and night after night, when I could have been spending time with the person whose company I enjoy most in this world. I cannot pay you those days and nights back – but I will not forget them, and I promise not to write anything else, for a while.

George and Susan Roland Thank you for the conception, the birth, the upbringing and the fact that you still seem to be looking after me, even though I am in my mid-40s. I would like to go back a little bit, though. I remember my childhood as one spent playing. Later in the book, I discuss where teachers of young learners can get inspiration from. Thank you for spoiling your children with such a massive range of things to do, both when times were easy and when they were not. It truly was a gift. I know I speak for all three of us. Many of those activities have found their way, in one form or another, into the classes I write about here – so I would also like to thank you on behalf of anyone who reads, is reading, or has read, the book, and found it useful.

About the author Chris is a teacher, trainer and ‘ideas man’, well-known for his lively but practical sessions on the international conference circuit. He has taught in both the private academy sector and mainstream education system in Spain as well as holding posts with the British Council in Damascus and Barcelona. He works with teachers across a wide range of contexts. These include in-house training for ELI, the language school where he is based in Seville; intensive courses on methodology for Lexical Lab, London and tutoring on Trinity Diploma courses for Oxford TEFL, Barcelona. He is a regular speaker at events organised by TESOL Spain and has a close working relationship with APPI, the association for teachers of English in Portugal. He has recently made repeat appearances for Teachers for Teachers, Ukraine, and has been co-moderator at the ELT Trends conference in Moscow. He is the author of Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom (Pavilion Publishing, 2018) and has contributed many articles to English Teaching professional magazine.

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Introduction Why teach kids? I am going to answer this question by way of three examples from the classroom.

Example one: Jonathan This is a small piece of hard baked bread, about two centimetres tall.

Figure 0.1: A pico

In Spain it is called a pico and is typically served as accompaniment to small dishes of cheese, dips or slices of salted fish. If you are a lover of tapas, you will have seen many of these. In Italy a similar breadstick would be called a mini grissino. With three simple pencil marks, we have given it eyes and a mouth.

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Figure 0.2: Much more than just a pico

It was a pico before, but now it is Jonathan. Jonathan can whisper questions (in English) to the teacher. Strangely enough, the teacher is the only person who can hear Jonathan, but the teacher can then relay those questions to a class full of six-year-olds: Teacher: Eva: Teacher:

Jonathan’s got a question for … Eva! What? What? Jonathan says: what’s your favourite food?

Jonathan then becomes a device for practising our core curriculum questions, with the teacher deciding whether or not to grade their input language higher by providing students with exposure to the more complicated structure of indirect questions such as: ‘Jonathan would like to know what your favourite food is.’ In this way Jonathan can be used across the board, with children from four or five years old right up to ten. The students can try to make questions for Jonathan, with the teacher reformulating and asking the contributing learner to repeat just one more time before they get a reply. It turns out that Jonathan just happens to be six years old – or the same age as most of the class on any given day. He was born locally, in the same town,

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Introduction

but not in a hospital. He was born in a factory, or at the baker’s – whichever word comes up in a later unit of the coursebook. He likes pizza (because people do not normally eat breadsticks with pizza), but he does not like potato salad (because people do sometimes eat breadsticks with potato salad). Jonathan can live in a special place at the top of the whiteboard where he will become quite a talking point if he manages to last from one lesson to another. Jonathan as an entity will create curiosity. The students will want a closer look but in order to do so they will have to repeat: ‘Can I see more closely?’ or ‘Will you get Jonathan down for me to see?’ The question: who would like to hold Jonathan? is likely to generate a great deal of enthusiasm, and again, you, the teacher, can gently insist on all sorts of language as a prerequisite for doing so. We can take this further and let the children make their own bread stick person, as we shall see in later chapters. Jonathan, Francesca, Breadstick Z or whatever name you decide on could be an entire lesson or a short two-minute minute spot. There is as much in it as you want, and it is basically free. Jonathan could be anything, and frequently has been; a piece of macaroni, a stick of chalk or a twig.

Example two: the office In a class of seven- and eight-year-olds, I had been jumping about at the front for at least 20 minutes, running through routines, pointing to pictures, revising vocabulary and priming them for a considerably challenging worksheet. It was time to sit down for a while, so I pulled a chair up to one of two small desks which were pushed together to form an ‘L’ shape and which were serving as my base of operations. ‘I will be in my office if you need help,’ I said to the class, first in English and then in their L1. ‘No previous appointment is necessary.’ The children, who were sitting in chairs that had mini-tables as extensions of one of the armrests, all settled down to their worksheets. As they did so, one little boy pulled his chair/desk combo up to my own desks.

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‘I want to work in the office as well.’ ‘Welcome to the office!’ I said enthusiastically, standing briefly so that I could lean over and shake his hand. ‘We are workmates now!’ It was not long before another child decided that this would be a good idea, too, then another, and another. My students’ mini-table armrest extensions were fixed so they could not get right up to the desks (which were piled up with materials, books and papers in any case). So, instead we had a random cluster of chairs and table tops, centred around where I was, and growing outwards at a range of angles until most students were part of it. Those that were not were happy in their original places. Every fresh arrival at the office got a greeting and a handshake. The combination of proximity to the teacher, change of space and element of play meant that doing their language exercises in ‘the office’ was somehow more attractive. What had begun as a throwaway comment of mine had snowballed spontaneously. When progress slowed and energy levels for the worksheet dipped, I was able to motivate my workers by reminding them that we had a big deadline pending and that we all had to put in 110% for this to be the best company ever.

Example three: the teacher’s socks At home I have red socks, yellow socks, striped socks, ones with space invader aliens and others with various Avengers on them: there’s a Thor pair, a Hulk pair, an Ironman pair and a Captain America pair. I also have socks with bananas and burritos on them. I have, however, made no particular attempt to wear matching socks for years. ‘Can we see your socks today, teacher?’ asks one of my learners. ‘Yeah, sure,’ and I lift up a trouser leg and lower it again. ‘And the other one?’ ‘This one?’ and I point to the same leg. ‘No. No. The other one!’ ‘Why?’ ‘I want to see.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I just want to see.’

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By now, everybody is involved but before I show anybody my second sock, we go around the class and everyone has to say: ‘I think it’s going to be the same.’ or ‘I think it’s going to be different.’ I write students’ predictions on the board as we go around the room, and then they get to see if their teacher’s socks actually match. Regardless of whether they do, as we have students guessing for either outcome, the final response is always energetic. Let us come back to our starting point, which was the question: why would you want to teach kids? Illustrated by way of these examples, my simple answer is: why would you not want to teach kids? Why would you not want a job where you can draw on nearly anything, invent imaginary characters, redesign your workspace and dress up as eccentrically as you wish? While not all teachers will have the range of socks I have, the aim of the ideas in the book is to give you inspiration to help you to be innovative in your teaching practice. Part of my purpose in writing this book is to show you how young learner teaching can be fun. Another part of it is to discuss the principles we might take as guidelines in order to structure that fun. Already we can see a number of those principles in the examples above. Firstly, most everyday objects, such as breadsticks, can have an incredible amount of novelty value, especially if they are not normally seen in a classroom. Secondly, if you put eyes on something, it becomes a being. Thirdly, there is a lot that occurs spontaneously in classrooms between our learners and ourselves that we can embrace. Finally, there is value in making room for both play and the imaginary.

How this book came about and who it is for I wrote this book with three specific groups of teachers in mind. In the first place, I wrote it for people who may not naturally see themselves as young learner teachers or do not consider young learner teaching as their ‘thing’. This group includes people who may have done their initial

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Introduction

pre-service training with adults but whose first teaching post unexpectedly involves young learner classes, or teachers who have taught adults for many years, and now, perhaps through a change of location or market need, find themselves tasked with teaching children if they wish to take up a contract in their desired school, position or region. This group also includes teachers who feel awkward clapping, dancing or singing songs, teachers who are not comfortable with arts and crafts, teachers who do not see themselves as particularly good storytellers, teachers who are not used to dealing with children, who do not feel confident being the leader and who, if left to their own inclinations, might seek the quieter sanctuaries of higher ages and levels. Just like these teachers, I began my first young learner lessons with very little idea and very little natural flair. What followed were many years of experimentation. I started out with more misses than hits, worked my way to a fifty-fifty balance of successes and failures, figured out increasingly how to tip the odds in my favour, and ended up in a place where most of the things I attempted worked most of the time. At this point I began to share my favourite activities in workshops at in-house level and later at national association level, and eventually on the international conference scene. The majority of my audiences were, and continue to be, practising teachers who need fresh ideas. These make up the second group of people who this book has been written for: if you already know where you stand on classroom management techniques and learning theory and have picked up this book just to get some fresh ideas for activities, then you will find lots and lots of them. I still teach young learners as part of my regular weekly timetable, which means that any idea you read about in this book has already been trialled, is something that has already proved helpful to teachers, and is something that on any given day I might be using again in my own classes. After I had been running workshops for primary teachers for various years, I started to notice that my most successful activities fell into patterns. I have spent the last decade identifying the recurring elements, refining my explanations of them and using those to help a third group. That group consists of experienced teachers who wish to take their young learner teaching a step further, either on diploma-level teaching courses

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or simply for their own professional development. That means there is, hopefully, a technical element to the book that will make it useful to those teachers wishing to re-examine what goes on in their classrooms in a more detailed way.

How this book is organised This book contains a collection of ideas and pointers meant to complement ELT lessons with primary-aged children across a range of contexts. While describing many classroom activities, it aims to be more than a simple recipe book. The reality of teaching young learners is complex, so we aim to go beyond each activity and consider its rationale and workings. To this end I have included analogies, lesson commentaries, anecdotes and discussions of common classroom situations as well as case studies and observations taken from other teachers’ and teacher trainers’ experiences. Part 1 covers classroom management, the process of creative teaching and the principles of language learning. These will provide a base as we move on to look at various dimensions of fun in Part 2. There are a number of Downloadable resources which can be found online at www.pavpub.com/ structuring-fun-for-young-learners-resources. At the end of each chapter there are three mini sections. The end summary contains a list of takeaways, which reiterate the four or five most important principles dealt with in that chapter. (You will also find a summary list of my central principles for young learner teaching on page 14.) Over the years I have noticed that one of the biggest concerns that teachers have is how to get activities to work. The Questions for reflection section contains questions to help you reflect on how the ideas presented in each chapter might translate to your own classroom, and what the next steps might be if you are thinking of trying something out. As a major aim of the book is to help teachers see, draw out and make use of pedagogic principles, the Things to try section suggests several of the activities featured in the chapter for trying in your own class context.

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Central principles for young learner teaching The following are not meant as instructions or imperatives to the reader; they are the guiding maxims that I have established for my own teaching over the years. This entire book is, in a way, an explanation of them. As a rough guide, I have found that whenever a lesson stage combines three or more of these principles, we have the makings of a highly productive activity. ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■

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Link recurring classroom events to language. Keep that language evolving. Teach stretches of language that might be used in other settings. Enjoy choosing the language you are teaching additionally to your coursebook. Create multiple opportunities for exposure to the same language item. With sentences, ask yourself: do they know what individual words they are saying? Also ask: do they know what those individual words mean? ‘Sandwich’ first language (L1) use (see Chapter 1 for an explanation). Bend your favourite activities round your syllabus. Bend your teacher talk and classroom narrative round your students. Narrate as much as you can*. Exploit unexpected events as an additional resource. Employ grammar awareness-raising/noticing, even if not teaching grammar explicitly. Be generous with in-class support. Remember that if you ask young learners to do something with nothing, you create stress. Embrace the imaginary and make time for play. Include tasks where learners get to move about. Explore fun through the novelty use of space, objects and text. Exploit the physicality of objects.** Remember that when you draw eyes on something, it becomes a being. Exploit changes over time. Exploit your own persona to create curiosity.

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■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■

Explore organic plant-based or nature-based teaching. Increase your students’ agency. Amplify students’ voices through opinion and prediction. Develop your out-of-class support systems, by maintaining healthy channels of communication with administration and parents. Try to create a continuum for your students between class and home. Remember that when the enthusiasm comes from your students, you are in control.

*Thanks to Ray Carleni and Anastasia Bykova for inspiring this principle. **Thanks to Ana Demitroff for inspiring this principle.

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Part 1

Chapter 1: Working with groups of young learners – the basics The vision In 2012, Belgian artist Eric van Hove took the blueprint for a Mercedes V12 car engine and, with the help of more than 40 Moroccan craftsmen, reconstructed the motor by copying its 450 parts using a range of traditional materials. These included wood, terra cotta, bone, goatskin, tin and brass. The resulting art piece, the Laraki V12, is truly stunning – with a quick internet search you can view it online. It lies somewhere between art and science. It combines both the organic and the traditional with mathematical precision. For me this is the perfect analogy for successful young learner classes. On the one hand, the learners want colours, textures, variety of activities and materials, enthusiasm, patience and human warmth. Underlying this, however, successful classes also require a technical design in terms of staging, logistics and language. In this chapter and the rest of Part 1, we will look at lots of little tricks, and some big ones, that will help make our young learner teaching an art and a science at the same time.

Getting the learners’ attention Be ready for what young learner classes are like Let us take a look now inside young learner classes. Let us see the reality. With an adult class, there will be moments when your students are all looking at you, waiting for you to speak. You can expect that with an adult class. With a young learner class, you could be waiting for a very long time.

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Chapter 1: Working with groups of young learners – the basics

In fact, that moment may never materialise at all. Somebody is always doing something… else. You have constant movement. It is like being dropped onto a moving conveyor belt. It is the small choices that you make, dozens of choices per minute adding up to hundreds of choices per class, that will help nudge your lessons in the direction that you want.

Grab the moment Rather than waiting for the point when everyone is listening to you, you often have to seize it. Let us imagine you have signalled to a class of fiveyear-olds that you want their attention. Most of them are listening and looking your way. One little boy is trying to swim on his belly on the floor, so you call his name and encourage him to sit on his chair but you do not slow the pace to make him and his swimming practice ‘a thing’. Another child is playing with a novelty pencil sharpener she has brought along, but you have most students’ attention, so you grab the moment and launch into a demonstration of the next activity. Starting to speak or show the class something before you have everyone’s attention may feel counter-intuitive. My advice, however, is that if and when you do manage to get more or less everyone looking and listening at the same time, do not delay. It is often a matter of split-second timing. The more responsive students, who reacted to your initial signal, will only be able to wait so long before they themselves start to become distracted, even as their slower-to-react colleagues are turning their attention towards you.

Employ captivation techniques I mentioned signalling to the class. We call these signals captivation techniques. We can have rhymes such as: ‘1, 2, 3, Look at me!’ I also use ‘Ready … steady … stop!’ We can count down slowly from ten, five or three, depending upon how long we think it is going to take students to give us their attention, with the expectation that when we get to zero everyone is watching the teacher. We can also accompany this with the visual gesture of counting on our fingers. We can use a hotel reception style bell, the sort you hit. The only downside here is that depending on the acoustics of your centre, the ping of this type of bell might be heard in other classrooms and annoy your colleagues. In such cases, a small dinner service bell, the sort you shake, can make a much friendlier tinkle.

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Chapter 1: Working with groups of young learners – the basics

Figure 1.1: This jazzed-up bell served me well for several years.

I sometimes use a pair of wooden claves to get my students’ attention. These are available from music shops and for me the sound is a little more neutral – less of a strain on our students and ourselves. They are particularly useful for signalling when we want our students to change partner in a whole class mingling activity where everyone is talking in pairs.

Figure 1.2: Wooden claves like these can be struck together for a neutral signal to the class.

The claves can be used in class in various other ways. In Downloadable resource 1, you can see a video where I am using claves and translation from my learners L1 to analyse the vocabulary in a text with a group of upper-primary students.

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Give your captivation techniques consequence The aim of all of these techniques is to get to the point where most children have stopped what they were doing and are listening, giving you the opportunity to introduce the next activity or to provide some guidance or language. If a signal requires a response, then it is much more attractive than asking students to simply stop what they are doing. If there is the chance that the teacher’s signal leads on to something else, then it will have an increased sense of consequence, and be more attractive to the children. My own standard signal, for many years, has been to touch my nose with one hand and put the other hand in the air. Once everyone is doing this, I may switch hands – from nose to air and from air to nose – while making a swishing sound. This developed into a series of short stories where the characters were my fingers and hands (first covered in Roland, 2015). The action unfurls in one-second increments so that the children can follow and copy each small part of the story immediately afterwards. Sometimes I accompany the mimes with dialogue, delivered in a squeaky voice. Figures 1.3–1.5 show the first part of the sequence: one hand becomes a character that giggles naughtily and then creeps slowly up on the other character, who is sleeping (and making snoring sounds). The teacher shows the students the story bit by bit, so they can copy each little bit of action. The next part of the sequence, shown in Figures 1.6–1.8, involves the naughty character approaching the sleeping one and shouting loudly, waking the sleeping one with a start. Finally (Figure 1.9), the woken hand tells the first one off with: ‘Please don’t shout!’ (delivered in whatever strange voice you can manage). To conclude the story, the first hand says: ‘I’m sorry’. Both of these sentences are useful for later on in class when our students have become too noisy themselves.

Figures 1.3–1.5: One hand becomes a character that creeps up on the other character, who is sleeping.

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Figures 1.6–1.8: When the naughty character is close to the sleeping one, it shouts loudly, waking the other with a start.

Figure 1.9: Finally, the woken hand tells the first one off.

An easy follow-up to this story would be to ask the class: Teacher: What happened? Student: [In L1] It was sleeping and it got woken up. Teacher: That’s right. It was sleeping. Everybody say: sleeping. In Downloadable resource 2, you can see a selection of these sequences storyboarded. You can also make your own up, including some ‘squeaky language’ that might be of use to your students. The important thing is that no single movement is so drawn out that it is difficult to copy. Another good idea is to practise the story at home first, maybe in front of a mirror – but tell anyone you live with what you are doing so that they do not worry about you.

Use language from the students’ perspective Transitions are how students can be moved from one activity to another. This will normally include a captivation technique, an established response, and then further information from the teacher, such as instructions, a demonstration or a simple signal, where the next activity is a familiar one. To begin a transition, as well as the claves, bells or gestures, I also use the verbal prompt: ‘I’m sitting on my chair.’ Rather than use the imperative, ‘Sit down!’ I like to give instructions in the Structuring Fun for Young Learners in the ELT Classroom © Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd and its licensors 2020

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Chapter 1: Working with groups of young learners – the basics

first person, present continuous. Other utterances that I use in a similar way are: ‘I’m sitting properly.’ ‘I’m singing the song.’ ‘I’m listening to the story.’ ‘I’m working hard.’ ‘I’ve done my homework.’ and ‘I’ve finished my work.’ At primary school age, our students are going to have relatively little opportunity to use imperatives. If they arrive home from English class and start trying to tell their parents what to do (for example: ‘Sit down, Mum!’ or ‘Finish your work, Daddy!’), they might not receive a very positive reaction. Affirmative statements from their own point of view are more useful to them and also allow the children to respond when the teacher asks: ‘What are you doing?’ As my students come to the end of the primary age range, I start to phase this technique out and address nine and ten-year-olds more directly, with conventional requests.

Using points If you were to observe a number of random young learner classes, you would probably see most teachers using some sort of points system. There might be points for individuals, or teams during lessons or a reward chart at the end. Some teachers and methodology writers object to reward systems like these (for more, see Kohn, 1993). One argument is that rewards are the flip side of punishment, another is that they are manipulative, and a third is that they motivate students to do things in the short term but detract from learning having value in and for itself. I myself do use a points system with young learners most of the time, but I agree that such systems can be as detrimental to a class as they are beneficial, depending upon how they are used. I would therefore like to offer some pointers as we go on.

Consider points as a mode of feedback Teachers are there to guide their students’ learning. As the adult in the room, your role is also to guide their behaviour in terms of safety and wellbeing for the time they are with us. We might see the use of points during

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class simply as another feedback channel, to let the children know how the teacher feels about their performance. A temporary currency is created through those points, turning the lesson into a game, of sorts. What we do not want, however, is for the points or the game to obscure the reason our students are in the classroom in the first place.

Using classroom management apps Let us imagine that you have just given the verbal cue: ‘I’m singing the song’. You press play on your audio, and everybody sings their hearts out. Then you might decide to award the class a point. I tend to do this using a classroom management app such as ‘ClassDojo’ or ‘Class 123’ (though there are many others available).  undo

+ note

Students

Parents

Students

Groups

5 Ruth

8

10

Phil

6 Mike

Behaviours

Graham

6

35

Emma

Whole class

+ group

+ student

Figure 1.10: The avatar screen from a classroom management app

Such applications allow you to display students as avatars. The most important thing is that they also allow you to customise the desired behaviours, so you can include all the first-person prompts mentioned above,

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Chapter 1: Working with groups of young learners – the basics

for example, ‘I’m sitting on my chair!’ or ‘I’m singing the song!’ or even, ‘I’ve done my homework!’ Being able to customise the rewarded behaviours is, I would say, the most important feature in a classroom management application like this.

Avoid competitiveness I use these apps in a slightly different way from the way they might normally be used. In my classes, whenever possible, everyone receives points together. This avoids competitiveness or students getting frustrated or demotivated because they have fewer points. When we get to 100 points, the children know they are going to have a party, or some other in-class event to celebrate.

Make a promise worth a point ‘But Christopher,’ I hear you say, ‘How do we give everyone the same points if they have not all done the homework, for example, or if they are not all singing the song?’ There is a quick fix to this. First, the students who have done their homework get to hold their books up above their head, say ‘I’ve done my homework!’ and get a point. Those who have not done it need to wait. Then, however, they also get the chance to earn a point if they say: ‘I will do my homework!’ Not only has a pledge been elicited but the expression of future time has also been worked into this section of the class. Again, if students are singing along to an audio recording particularly well, they can be awarded a point. More reticent singers can promise to sing the song in subsequent renditions, be it in the same class or in another with: ‘I will sing the song’. As you can see on this generic version, you can tailor behaviours on classroom management apps, so that students who have not quite got there in terms of what you are asking them to do can still promise to do so and (if they look like they mean it) earn a point like their peers.

Humanise your points system Although all students are on the same points, you can still take a point away from a student if needed. When you take a point away, tell the student why and then give them a chance to win that point back by telling them what they need to do differently over the next two or three minutes. Similarly, if a student does something that stands out, you might say: ‘Marta, you’ve

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just earned everyone a point!’ or even: ‘Marta, you’ve just earned a point. Would you like to share that point with everybody else?’ If she is willing to do so, we can ask her to say the additional sentence: ‘Here you are everybody!’ Similarly, if somebody is absent, at the end of the lesson, we can ask the class: ‘Shall we give David some points? Yes? Okay, everyone say: “Here you are David!”’.

 undo

+ note

Student

Parents

Positive

Behaviours

Negative

I did my homework!

I will do my homework!

I’ve finished my work!

I will finish my work!

I’m singing the song!

I will sing the song!

Figure 1.11: A mock up of a classroom management app behaviours page.

In any case, and I explain this to my students, if the points are uneven at the end of the lesson, I will have evened them up by the start of the next one – so when an individual student does earn a point for doing something special, they are really earning a point for everyone. With these measures, the points system is preserved as a feedback channel but some of its common pitfalls have been avoided. As they can be such a prominent part of young learner classes, we will revisit the idea of points in the next chapter, including non-technological ways of awarding and recording them.

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Being ‘you’ in class Run on the ‘big you’ I referred to teachers with quieter personality types in the introduction of this book. With young learners, there is a sense that teachers do have to step up and become a slightly more bossy version of themselves. You have to be the leader and give direction. If you are naturally more of an introvert, like me, this can take some adjusting. I am not suggesting a radical change of identity. You do not need to try to be someone else. It is simply a case of being a larger, proactive version of yourself – a little bit more vocal, a little bit more theatrical.

State the obvious With children’s classes, teachers so often have to state the obvious. This is a shift we need to get used to. For example, Melanie has her face only centimetres from Nacho’s and she is making the sound of a growling tiger. ‘Melanie, we keep this far away [teacher gestures 30 cm or so]. That’s a good distance. Nacho likes that more. Well done, that’s better.’ Maybe Jessica is rummaging around on your table: ‘Jessie, we look, we don’t touch. If we want something from the teachers table we ask: “Can I have a …”.’ Articulate everything, and in so doing make clear to your students your position and your expectations – and then move on.

Try to avoid direct confrontation Another thing that can come as a shock for teachers transitioning from adult classes is that little children can sometimes just refuse to do something: ‘I don’t want to’. What we do not want is a situation where we have forced a standoff. ‘Well you will do it.’ ‘No, I won’t!’ In many cases, this leaves the teacher nowhere to go. Instead, we want to nudge the child in the right direction. ‘I don’t want to do the worksheet.’ ‘Okay, but that’s what we’re doing. Let me know if you change your mind.’

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Or: ‘I don’t want to do this exercise.’ ‘Hmm… okay. If you just do the first three questions, then I’ll be happy.’

Mix it up I have just explained that teachers often need to be a larger, more vocal version of themselves. In the next chapter we will look at going too far with this. Such contradictions follow each other in rapid succession in the young learner classroom. In terms of challenging behaviour, one moment you may need to take a softer, more flexible approach and a few moments later you may need to react to something else in a less flexible manner. Once in a while, you may have a group that becomes accustomed to objecting, sighing or complaining in response to whatever they are asked to do. While we do not want to invalidate individual students’ voices and honest communications with us, this is sometimes a collective strategy that can quickly make your day-to-day class time quite miserable. If you see this becoming the micro-culture of a group, it is best to take some fairly radical action early on to change the nature of the game. Most groups are robust enough to handle the following addition to established behaviours: Complaining = –1 point! That does not mean you need to deduct points every time there is a slight quibble but, once this rule has been put in place, if there is a case of unnecessary whingeing, the question: ‘Are you complaining?’ can shut this down.

Make life easy Adjacency pairs are formulaic exchanges between two speakers. Every language has them, but for a little variety let us look at some examples not in English. As-salaam alaikum is known the world over as the Arabic greeting ‘Peace be with you’, and the standard response is Wa alaikum salaam, ‘And peace be with you’. Another of my favourite adjacency pairs in Arabic is the lesser-known Sabah al-kheir’ (literally, ‘Morning of goodness’) and the response, which is Sabah al-noor, ‘Morning of light’. There are a number of adjacency pairs that you may wish to establish within the context of your own young learner classes. The one I would like to share with you here is the following: ‘Problem?’ ‘No problem.’

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I think you will find establishing this as a sequence extremely useful. Our young learners live in a constant state of tension between what they are doing and what they are meant to be doing. This helps us to manage them on the one hand, but it means there will be regular queries when rules appear to be uncertain, conflicting or broken. Defusing this tension and uncertainty is one of our functions – without, of course, shutting down a student who has a real problem. Last week some of my seven-year old students said: ‘Teacher, teacher! Leo’s sleeping.’ [He was – or he was trying to]. ‘Problem?’ ‘No problem.’ On this particular day, Leo looked worn out. I gave him my fleece as a pillow. He had a nap for five minutes, woke up and joined in with the next activity.

Get them to say it If you want your young learners to repeat language, you often actually have to prompt them a few times: ‘Go on, say it …’. By this time, they may have forgotten what it is you wanted them to say, so you model it for them again or, if it is a longer utterance, model it in stretches so they can echo you bit by bit. This may all seem a little mechanical and coercive. It is certainly tiring for the teacher but let us not forget that there are some aspects of language acquisition that are quite mechanical. It certainly does not happen by magic. If students do not practise a phrase or sentence by actually saying it, it will take them much longer to pick it up.

Focus on students who are doing things well Last week, as I write, my seven-year-olds had watched a video and were rating it. The sentence they needed to say was: ‘I’d give it a [score of 1–10] out of ten.’ To begin with, however, they were just giving me one-word answers. Student 1: Five… Student 2: Ten… Student 3: One hundred… Teacher: …out of ten!? There I was gently prompting: ‘I’d give it… I’d give it…’, until one student, who we shall call Margaret, said the sentence perfectly without being cued: ‘I’d give it seven out of ten.’ ‘Excellent, Margaret, you get a point for the whole class for that because you said it correctly.’ 30

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Her classmate, who we shall call Bill, was sat across from Margaret and I could see him thinking: I want a point as well and now I know how to get one. He had already just had a turn but put his hand up anyway. ‘Teacher, can I have another turn?’ ‘Of course you can!’ After he managed to do the same, the whole group shifted over to the longer utterance. As teacher, I had stipulated the currency I wanted to trade in (a specific full sentence and a numerical rating between one and ten) and the students could see the way forward. One of my most important key principles can be seen at work here. The more an activity is fuelled by our students’ enthusiasm, the more that puts us in the driving seat in terms of being able to steer the activity and make on-the-spot adjustments. When the enthusiasm comes from the teacher alone, we relinquish much of that control to our students.

Giving learners a turn to answer questions One of the most charming characteristics of young learner classes, which you will have noted from your very first lesson with them, is that the students are still eager to answer their teacher’s questions. Children generally want to participate, and they all want to have a turn, so that in your question and answer stages there will be lots of hands in the air wanting to respond. This can help fuel your lesson, but it can also be a little overwhelming, especially if you have lots of hands straining in the air each time but you only have, for example, a handful of questions prepared. If you ask each of your questions only once, to a single student, then all but the answering student are going to be disappointed after each question and you will get to the end of the lesson stage with some children not having had a chance to answer at all. There is a simple little trick here that will increase the sense of participation in your groups. That is to allow multiple students to answer the same question. We can do this in one of two ways which I shall call confirmed repetitions and mystery harvest.

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Use confirmed repetitions Confirmed repetitions work best with lower age ranges. Ask your question and if the first child gets the answer right, confirm that emphatically, and then proceed to ask exactly the same question to any other students who still have their hands in the air allowing them to give the same answer. If the first child answering acts as a cue for the others to put their hands down, you can quickly ask: ‘Who got the same answer?’ or ‘Who else wants to tell me?’ In this way, more children get to practise and, because the correct answer is already out there, you can also go on to nominate weaker students who might not have got the answer right initially. Not having been the first one to give the correct answer seems to bother younger students less, but if there are any objections such as, ‘Pepe already said it’, we can simply reassure them that it does not matter. My typical reply would be ‘Problem?’ to which, as we have seen, my students very quickly learn to respond, ‘No problem’.

Try a ‘mystery harvest’ Students at upper-primary levels will still want to offer an answer, but not if the correct one has clearly already been given. A way around this is to take (or ‘harvest’) an unconfirmed sample of answers, and then to reveal the correct one. So, the teacher asks the first student with their hand up, acknowledging the contribution but moving quickly on to another student, and another, and another. A typical exchange might go like this: Teacher:  So, what animals does Emma like? Let’s see what you’ve all got. Pablo? Pablo: She likes dolphins. Teacher:  That’s what Pablo says. Maybe yes, maybe no. Sam, what do you think? Sam: She likes dolphins. Teacher: Marta? Marta: She likes rhinos. Teacher: Maxi? Maxi: She likes cats. Teacher: …and Anna? Anna: She likes dolphins. Teacher: …and the correct answer is that she likes dolphins.

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Here, five students have been involved in a single question. They have had a chance to respond and a chance to practise the sentence She likes + animal, which, in normal class dialogue, would have needed some teacher prompting along the way: reminding students to include the s on likes, the s on the animal species, and to give us a full sentence each time. By beginning the round with ‘Let’s see what you’ve all got’, children can pick up what type of questioning is being used and that the first answer from Pablo may still be correct, even though you are asking more children.

Give students a second chance This is a simple technique to help students correct themselves when giving spoken answers to the teacher. Imagine you ask Student 1 (S1) a question and they give us an incorrect answer, or they do not know, as illustrated below. S3 S2 S1 T You indicate clearly that the answer is not correct by saying, ‘No, good try’ or by saying, ‘No problem’ if they do not have an answer. You then ask the same question to a second student (S2), who does get the answer correct. S3 S2 S1 T You confirm the correct answer clearly, then go back and ask Student 1 again, giving them the chance to amend their answer. This leaves Student 1 in a positive position. S3 S2 S1 T We have now looked at teacher–student interactions at a nuts-and-bolts level. This is the very stuff of our day-to-day teaching, and so it is worth reflecting on the micro-systems that we use (i.e. the way we decide on who to ask from question to question and student to student) and possibly updating them once in a while.

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Helping students to get along with each other Gabe’s letter Gabe was an eight-year-old student in an after-school academy class that I was teaching some years ago. At the end of class, several months into the academic year, he slipped me a folded-up piece of paper. ‘This is a letter for you teacher,’ he said. I thanked him and put it on my shelf. ‘Have you read the letter yet?’ he asked at the end of the following lesson. ‘I’m terribly sorry, I put it up here and I forgot about it.’ ‘Read it, teacher.’ ‘I will. I promise.’ That evening I did. The letter was in Spanish, as had been the conversation above. I have translated it but maintained the same impressive register that Gabe did (given his age) and I have also used his style of letters so that my translation very closely resembles the original. I keep a lot of letters, notes and examples of student work from my classes but this is one of my all-time favourites. I use it as a reminder to myself (and to the teachers I read it to at conferences) that sometimes our students can drive each other nuts. Their classmates both define and limit their worlds (as much as their teachers do) and sometimes they can feel quite trapped with one another.

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Figure 1.12: My translated version of Gabe’s letter

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Chapter 1: Working with groups of young learners – the basics

Pre-plan groupings One way to work around personality clashes in the classroom is to decide which children work well in pairs or threes on speaking practice activities and to write those groupings down under the heading ‘birds’ (or ‘flock of birds’ if you want to extend your students’ language). Then think about who works well together on projects or crafts and put these groupings down under the heading ‘ants’ (or ‘army of ants’). Finally, decide what the ideal groupings for activities that involve puzzles or testing each other’s memory through student–student dictations and the like would be. Put these groupings down under the heading ‘elephants’ (or ‘herd of elephants’). There may well be some repetition across the various headings. The animal headings reflect the sort of performance you are looking for. Birds sing together sweetly. Ants work co-operatively on major tasks. Elephants, they say, have a long memory. Explain this to your students and put your combinations chart on the wall of our classroom. When you say, ‘Birds!’ before starting an activity, the children get into those groups, and so forth. For a small class, finished groupings might look like this: Birds

Ants

Elephants

Mary + Raquel

Fede + Mary + Raquel

Joy + Karim

Gabe + Karim

Henry + Silvio + Luisa

Henry + Fede

Fede + Peter

Gabe + Joy + Karim

Peter + Marco

Silvio + Joy

Peter + Marco + Pili

Raquel + Gabe

Luisa + Henry

Mary + Luisa

Marco + Pili

Pili + Silvio

These groupings allow you to make considered classroom management and task design decisions from the comfort of your own home or from the teachers’ room, rather than having to make pressured, quick-fix choices in the middle of a busy class. As the term progresses and you learn more about how students work together, you may want to make adjustments to your animals chart. If the students notice and remark on this, just smile and fall back on one of your go-to adjacency pairs: ‘Problem?’ ‘No problem.’

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Using this adjacency pair will provide you with an on-the-spot solution as we do not always have time to explain our teacher rationale to students during a busy class. As soon as is convenient though, it may be useful to explain to your students that change is good and that you would like to see how they can work and get on with different classmates over the course of the year.

Work through squabbles using the power of Sorry Often a child will come to you complaining about something one of their classmates has done: ‘Peter called me stupid!’ They are not normally looking for an in-depth inquiry into the matter. Rather, they want some small but swift token of justice. On such occasions, asking the offending student to say sorry in English is often enough to satisfy the complaining student. Most of the time children will not complain about a classmate for no reason. If the complaint forms part of a larger, more complex squabble, then the offender might refuse to say sorry, but if the teacher has actually seen the incident or if the student knows they were in the wrong, they will normally agree to say sorry for two reasons. Firstly, apologising in English does not seem quite such a real concession as apologising in their first language. Secondly, they will often recognise that this is an easy way to avoid getting into trouble, and to make the whole matter go away quickly. Occasionally a student will dig their heels in and refuse to apologise to another. In one of my classes, Estela, aged seven, had said something that annoyed Ellen, also seven. They were standing on chairs to write on a whiteboard at the time. Ellen then pushed Estela whose leg slipped down between the two chairs and in it doing so she banged herself on part of the chair. Ellen steadfastly refused to apologise, both at the time and at the end of the class. Rather than push the matter to the point where I would have had two little girls crying in the same lesson, I played the longer game. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but you have got a sorry pending. It won’t go away until you’ve said it and I will keep reminding you.’ The next lesson, Ellen murmured an apology to Estela. The idea of having a sorry pending is a way of keeping accountability and fairness on the agenda without forcing classroom dramas.

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Case study: Looking ahead When I observed Cristina Flores Sáenz at Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes school, in Seville, she was teaching a class of 25 children, aged around four. This was the second year she had been with the children as both tutor and English teacher, so many of their routines were well established. Nonetheless, I was surprised that the entire lesson was conducted in English. During the lesson, the children used tissue paper of various colours to make small balls, which they glued onto a picture of an umbrella on a rainy day, in effect colouring the picture to make a mosaic. Even when there was a moment of quiet, with all the children occupied, Cristina was busy monitoring the action in progress and predicting who would need assistance shortly. This proactive form of troubleshooting included looking to see which tables were about to run out of tissue paper and supplying more to avoid squabbles. It included seeing which students were getting their fingers too clogged up with glue to continue and sending them off to wash their hands, and then start afresh. It also included seeing which students had gone off-piste by sticking the wrong colour on a section of their picture, or who had become confused and stalled on the task. It was this technique of looking ahead that allowed Cristina to guide the children through the craft activity without getting bogged down with requests for support at any one moment. I would recommend to all teachers, even if you have only a few students, that whenever they are all on task (and whenever you have enough energy), instead of sitting back and waiting, you try to figure out where and by whom help will be required in advance. This will help you to spread your workload out more evenly over the lesson.

Enjoy the moments In this chapter we have looked at what young learner classes are really like, and how teachers can start to order what might feel at first quite overwhelmingly random. We have looked at keeping up motivation and maintaining a sense of fairness in terms of participation and when settling squabbles. I also told you the story of Gabe’s letter. There is a little bit more to that story though, which we will come on to.

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Chapter 1: Working with groups of young learners – the basics

In our second term I introduced the role of class monitor. A different student held this position each lesson and we rotated through their names on the register. Gabe was the monitor in early March, towards the end of that term. He was excited about the role, wore a recycled conference lanyard with Monitor written in it with pride but did not get to do much that day. ‘When will I be the monitor again?’ he asked. ‘Well, we need to go through everybody else first, then it will be your turn again.’ ‘Through everybody?’ ‘Yes.’ At that point he was a little watery eyed, but when I looked at him again a few seconds later he was actually crying – though trying not to make any noise. ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘That means,’ he said, between sharp breaths, ‘that I won’t be the monitor again until after the Easter holidays on the 22nd of April and that’s forever!’ Trapped between my own system of rotation on the one hand and this eightyear-old’s astonishing ability to calculate dates, I was momentarily at a loss. ‘I don’t know… maybe someone will agree to swap with you…’ Silvio, sitting in the next chair, straightened up and announced solemnly: ‘I’ll swap with you, Gabe.’ It was one of Silvio’s finest moments. With the last of his energy, head bowed and eyes closed, an emotionally wrought Gabe placed his hand palm-up on the armrest/mini-table between them and the two clasped hands in solidarity. Things can move along quickly in a young learner class, but there was something dramatic, comedic and quite noble about this 30-second sequence. When I talk about enjoying your teaching or enjoying your students, it is nuanced moments like these that I am referring to. These are what enable teachers to enjoy their time in the classroom as they are in the classroom.

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These moments are ephemeral but lingering. Students get older and grow up. They forget about some of these occasions and they remember others, just as they forget some of the English we have taught them and they remember some of it too. Our reward is in getting to see the journey for a while. 

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So, to sum up, think about the following and try to incorporate them into your future classes: be prepared for constant activity on the part of the students; make captivation techniques as engaging as possible; try to defuse tension in the classroom with respect to points or squabbles; allow as many children as possible to have a go at answering questions; and finally, look ahead and try to predict where your help will be needed.

Questions for reflection ■■ Do the variations on how to choose students to answer questions

discussed in this chapter seem like something you could put into practice? ■■ Do you currently use any captivation techniques to get your students

attention, and if so, how well are they working? ■■ Would a classroom management app be feasible in your room/lessons? ■■ Who would you put together in the birds, ants and elephants combinations as discussed in the chapter?

Things to try 1. In Downloadable resource 2 there are some more examples of simple stories. Decide how you would use the suggestions in your classroom. What other stories could you use in your classroom? 2. Trial the Problem? No Problem? Adjacency pair in your class and see if it reduces tension. 3. Explore the classroom management systems suggested (‘ClassDojo’ and ‘Class123’). If you are already using a CMS, decide if these are better. If you are new to CMSes, compare the two and decide which one would suit your needs best.

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Chapter 1: Working with groups of young learners – the basics

Further reading Kohn A (1993) Punished by rewards: The trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, A’s, praise, and other bribes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Roland C (2015) Storytime for the very young. English Teaching professional 100, 21–24.

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Chapter 2: Classroom management – some more little tricks Balancing survival strategies and language Some readers might have picked up this book wanting to know how to get through their first lesson. Indeed, for new teachers, simply getting through those first few weeks, months or even terms may be a main concern. In general, though, whenever you are thinking about how to get through class time, you are likely to be thinking from a very personal perspective and probably not a very productive one in terms of effective teaching. Ideally, you should be trying to do more than simply get through other people’s time. We want to give those little people language to take away. I therefore recommend that anyone looking for a survival guide to classes should read Part 1 of the book as a block, to get a balance of classroom management and language considerations. Here we will look at some of the issues from Chapter 1 in more detail and introduce a number of additional classroom management strategies. First of all, we return to the discussion about using a points system.

Using a points system effectively Make sure points do not get in the way In the previous chapter, we talked about students wanting to contribute and give answers simply for the joy of doing so. Imagine you are asking students about their favourite foods. The students are all eager to tell the teacher about their favourite meals and three or four have their hands

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up at any given time. In this case, there is no need to use a points system. In fact, if you start awarding points for individual answers, not only will you disrupt the flow of this part of the lesson, slowing things down and reducing the number of students who get to speak, but you may also detract from the value of using English as a means to communicate as an end in itself. If you think of points as a kind of currency, this would be like monetising the question and answer round unnecessarily. If you did want to acknowledge participation here, it would be better to do so at the end, giving everybody a point for collective effort. While on the subject of commercialising interactions, I once observed a class where the teacher had a large bag of Monopoly-style play money and was handing this out as rewards. It was an entertaining sight, and I did enjoy the fast-paced lesson a lot, but I noticed that even over the course of an hour’s class there seemed to be a sort of ‘inflation’ occurring, whereby the students were steadily receiving more money for their efforts. By the end, the teacher was handing out quite sizable wads of cash. A similar thing can happen over the course of an academic year: many of us end up awarding more points, more readily, by the time the summer holidays come round.

Make points a lesson stage If the teacher awards points at set stages in the lesson, rather than in reaction to individual acts, it saves them to-ing and fro-ing from the points chart or app and back. Again, for the sake of smooth classroom dynamics, it is a good idea to make it clear to your students that they cannot ask for points. They are the teacher’s prerogative. The moment that the teacher starts making deals, students will be encouraged to hustle for points and that will hamper you moving the class forward. We want to avoid becoming trapped by our own systems.

Ask your learners what they think about points I said to my current class of six- and seven-year-olds, a small group of students, whose first language is Spanish: ‘We are going to do something different for five minutes. I’m going to speak Spanish to you, not English. I’m going to ask you four questions. There are no correct answers. There are no incorrect answers, and you don’t have to answer either – but you do have to wait your turn if you want to answer.’

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The questions were: Why do we have a points system? What is more important, getting points or being nice to each other? Could we do without the points system? Do you like the points? After that, we voted on whether to keep our points system or not. The most common responses, echoed several times but with very similar formulations were: It helps us know how we are doing. It helps us see how we are behaving. These articulations echoed my general feelings about the use of points and were probably a result of how we have been using the apps discussed so far. In this class the vote was unanimously in favour of keeping the points system. I recorded the result and said that we would therefore keep the points but I did not give any sign of approval. I am not pretending that this was research. It formed part of my everyday teaching of these children. However, there are some useful things to take away from the episode. Firstly, students of this age can be consulted. Secondly, you may feel that your teaching comes alive when you start to let go of control, take risks or to put your own systems ‘on the line’. If you do not share your students’ L1, or if you wish to keep this stage in English, a simplified way of surveying the class would be to give each student two options: I like ‘ClassDojo’ or I don’t like ‘ClassDojo’. This will achieve the same end.

Consider simpler points systems Digital apps are not vital for recording points. Nicola Wright, one of my colleagues at ELI in Seville, uses the set-up in Figure 2.1 on page 44, involving plastic counters, Blu-Tack and a mini-board to record points during team games. Rather than record the points herself, the student whose role is to be the teacher’s helper for that day is the one responsible for recording the scores.

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Figure 2.1: A simple way to record points awarded to groups or teams of students

Use a more traditional points chart Some teachers like to use a points chart on which they award students a star or a sticker at the end of each lesson if they have done well. Again, to avoid the awkwardness and disappointment for a child of not giving a sticker at the end, I recommend trying to make sure that all students get a sticker. This might be achieved by accepting a promise that the student will try to perform better next time, as seen in the last chapter. Alternatively, you might award stickers before the end of the lesson to those students who have done well, while there is still 10 minutes or so for those who have not to try to put things right.

Figures 2.2–2.3: A funky progress chart. At the end of term, students were allowed to take their strip of stickers home.

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In figures 2.2 and 2.3 on page 44, you can see one of the more colourful points charts I have made with students in recent years. There was such an array of stickers used here that at the end I cut the chart into strips and let each child take their section home. Of course, they had to write then ask: ‘Teacher, can I take my stickers home please?’

Try using physical points To turn points into something physical, I have used a wide range of tokens including tamarind seeds, pieces of pasta and small silver foil balls. One form of paper points that I have used were little squares with a picture and corresponding word on each. These words and images all corresponded to the core vocabulary of the units we had studied. The best thing about using something like this is that each time a student earns a little square, they cannot help but look to see what the picture on it is. You can then sometimes see them mouthing the word below in English. In this way you are subtly increasing exposure to the target language.

Figure 2.4: Picture points: These silhouettes are based on items in a coursebook. At the end of a class you can allow students to glue what they have earned to their own simple progress chart.

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Trial the H point The H point consists of the letter H with a circle drawn around it. It goes at the top of the board with a student’s name next to it and can be awarded occasionally when you see a child helping another or otherwise being a particularly good classmate. I have never explained to my students where the H points go or what happens to them. ‘They are just there and they are good,’ is what I say. The children also need to know that you cannot ask for a helping point and you cannot deliberately engineer a situation just to get one. I have even overheard students planning a ‘performance’ before (‘You say you can’t do this question then I’ll come and give you the answer’) in order to earn one.

Managing classroom dynamics Beware of bottlenecking action So far I have spoken largely about whole-class activities, that is, activities in which we are doing something as a single collective unit, in lockstep. What we want to avoid in such contexts is students having to spend too much time waiting before they get a chance to do something. I use the term bottlenecking action to refer to moments when the majority of the class is waiting for just a few students to finish doing something before they can have their go. In terms of logistics, there is always a trade-off in the primary classroom. Everything comes with its own benefits but it also comes at the expense of something else. If you have a class of 25 students and half a dozen simple questions you want to practise, it would be unrealistic to hope to ask the children one by one. They will get restless waiting for their turn each time. Similarly, if you have two or three students up at the front of the class participating in some sort of tabletop activity, it is unrealistic to expect the others to sit and watch them from their chairs. Instead, what will happen is that the other students will steadily creep out of their chairs and end up huddled round wherever the action is taking place, sometimes even interfering with it. I call this the ‘Venus flytrap effect’ as it reminds me of how that carnivorous plant closes around its prey, engulfing and suffocating the movements of the fly. One solution that I use for many of the tabletop

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activities that you will see in this book, is to set up a parallel task that just one or two students can take part in while the rest of the class is busy with the main activity – such as a worksheet or page from their activity book.

Set up parallel tasks Here is an example of this sort of logistic in action. This parallel task, which I have been using recently, involves a simple toy consisting of a section of a bolt and some elongated nuts from a local hardware store. With correction fluid and a marker, I have put a day of the week on each nut and covered it with clear tape so the writing does not get rubbed away.

Figure 2.5: Creating pedagogic devices is a little beyond our role, but for those teachers who like playing with materials it can be fun.

In case you like this idea but are unable to get to a hardware store, a very simple alternative would be to use a shoe lace or a piece of string with a thick knot tied at one end. Your students then thread seven macaroni pieces onto it – each piece labelled with a day of the week. Thanks to Gill Roper, a colleague in Seville, for first introducing me to the idea of threading macaroni as a teaching aid.

Figure 2.6: Macaroni threaded onto a shoe lace will give you a similar, though less robust, device for practising the days of the week

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Set the task up in the corner so that one student at a time can be engaged on this activity, which involves threading the days of the week onto the bolt in order, without providing too much of a distraction to their classmates.

Figure 2.7: If the set-up is solid, one student can work on a practical task while their classmates work from the coursebook

There are a number of things you can do to make this task run smoothly. You will see that just above the student’s head, stuck to the wall, are the days of the week in the correct order. This is the language that the student needs. By having that sequence there, integral support on the task has been provided. We are helping to answer the problem that the task poses in the first place. The student can refer to this sequence and therefore be selfsufficient, rather than having to come to the teacher, who is working with the majority of the class, for help. In fact, it is the act of referring back to this sequence and then comparing it to what they have in their hands that enables students who have not yet consolidated the days of the week to do so on this task. Another useful inclusion when setting up a parallel task like this is to have the child who has just completed the activity reset it for the next one. Here that means unscrewing the nuts from the bolt and leaving them mixed up on the table so that another student can start immediately. This will result in more efficient transitions as one child hands over to the next and we can sell the reset by stressing the importance of mixing them up ‘really well’.

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Parallel tasks like these often work better if students are assigned to them in pairs. The task then becomes a social activity. They help each other, or one student can do the task and the other can time them with a stopwatch. In addition, the presence of a classmate as onlooker can serve to validate task completion. By this I mean that it may well be enough for their friend to see they have the days in the correct order so that not every student will have to come to show the teacher they have finished.

Figures 2.8 and 2.9: If students work on a task in pairs, they can provide company and support to each other. We can reduce the likelihood of squabbling by specifying who will take the primary role first and then having them swap over so each one gets a go.

The famous educator Maria Montessori, working in the early part of the last century, developed a system in which many little desks or tables were dotted around rooms, each constituting a work station with its own tray activity or sensory task. For the interested reader, I have provided details of one of her key works in the resources section at the end of the chapter (see page 62).

Managing unwanted behaviour Work with parents José was six but the language he was using in class was so strong it would have turned heads at the rowdiest of adult gatherings. As strings of filthy expletives rolled off his tongue, the other students could not wait to tell the teacher what he was saying. ‘José’s doing fine,’ I commented to his father after one lesson, ‘but, you know, he’s using some very colourful language.’ ‘I’ll talk to him,’ was the reply.

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That was it. The swearing ended. José did not seem traumatised or in any way resentful that I had mentioned this to his dad. Sometimes it really is as simple as that. As teachers, we occasionally build things up in our heads, questioning ourselves: What if the parent gets defensive? What if they take offence? What if they refuse to help? Most of the time, however, if you show genuine concern for a child, their parents will happily work with you. In terms of behaviour, you are not trying to accuse your students of being bad or to get them told off, you are simply trying to create a continuum between home and the classroom and the norms that are expected of them in each.

Set short-term behaviour targets More recently, Alice, a little older than José, would disrupt lesson flow in a number of ways. These included pulling faces at the others, switching places, making animal sounds, refusing to open her eyes and also insisting that we call her Martina, and then not responding to that because it was not her name. Some of her strategies were quite creative – ingenious even – but obviously this was affecting the amount and quality of language learning that was going on. The solution to these behaviours was the daily report on page 51, a technique I have also used with adolescents, upon which I would tick the behaviours she had achieved at the end of the lesson so that she could show her mum. The form looked very similar to this. You will note the inclusion of a happy face beneath the table. I also pasted in a cute image of a stick figure girl jumping about in a field of flowers to make the form a little warmer. The point I would like to emphasise is that the nature of this daily report is essentially dialogic. It began with a little meeting with Alice’s mother who came in outside of class time. I put the idea of the form to her and got a green light. The following lesson I talked Alice through the behaviours, which were tailored to her, in L1. I explained: ‘If you manage to get a tick in the same box for four lessons in a row, that thing disappears from the form.’ She would come to me at the end of each class and we would look over the behaviours. On the days that she managed to get a tick for everything, she would exit the class waving the paper with visible pride.

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Alice’s daily report Behaviour

Achieved?

Chooses a seat at the beginning of class and does not change places. Talks nicely to classmates (without saying things like: Shut up!) Respects classmates’ personal space without getting too close to their faces. Lets the others concentrate on their work without making sounds intended to annoy them. Does not pull faces at the others. Asks to borrow other people’s materials rather than taking them. [If a behaviour is achieved four lessons in a row, it disappears from the report ]

Teacher:

Date:

Mum: Interestingly, Alice seemed to prefer being on report than off it, enjoying the extra structure and guidance. I mentioned this to her, and she agreed. My experience is that the more closely the measures teachers can put on a form are tailored to the child, the more effective they are.

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Remember that parents do not always have the answer Basically, Alice’s report (on page 51) was an extended conversation between myself, Alice and her mum. Of course, parents do not always have the answers. I remember asking one mother of an eight-year-old: ‘What do you do when María says: “No!” and refuses to co-operate or to do anything at all?’, only to have her break down in tears because she really didn’t know, and her daughter was proving exceptionally difficult at the time. In general, though, any time spent talking to parents of a child helps reduce instances of that child doing things with you that they might not do at home.

Avoid stand-offs: another look In Chapter 1 we considered instances in which children refuse to do things. There is an established condition known as oppositional disorder, where a child systematically reacts against adult requests in defiance of perceived authority (Riley, 1997). All children will display some sort of oppositional behaviour now and then. We all feel like saying ‘No’ sometimes. I imagine that the reader did not and still does not do everything that is requested of them either. You will not always have detailed information about your students. Your concern will tend to be how to get the class to work in the moment. To reiterate and expand on the last chapter, what you want to do, in the face of oppositional behaviour, is not to make things a ‘win/lose proposition’, as Riley terms it. Again, compare: ‘Sit down now!’ with: ‘I really need you to sit in your place. I know you don’t want to, but would you help me with that?’

Turnaround time However you have framed the request, it is often necessary to allow a child some space in which to change direction. This is processing time – turnaround time. We all like to have a little space and I have found that making my wishes known, but then moving on to other students, rather than hovering over the same one waiting for them to do as I have asked, often increases rather than decreases co-operation.

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Case study: It’s not what you say but the way that you say it While based at Active Language in Cádiz, I was fortunate enough to observe María José Allely’s class of 30 five-year-old students at San Felipe Neri, a large semi-private school in the city. This was not an English lesson but a science lesson, given in the students’ local language. My purpose was to observe how the teacher spoke to her students and to pick up any useful classroom management techniques that she was using. I learned a lot from the lesson, especially in the way that María José phrased her instructions. I will give three examples of this, translated into English. When María José wanted everyone’s attention in order to transition to the next stage of a task, she would ask: ‘Are we all ready?’ or ‘Are we all here?’ At this point one student was not in his seat but wandering round the class. She continued: ‘No. Jaime’s not ready’. Then she waited a few seconds, by which time Jaime had got to his place, and asked again: ‘Are we all ready?’ And together with her, the students said: ‘Yes!’ In this way, the teacher had emphasised group cohesion, getting Jaime to sit down, without ever confronting him directly. Let me ask the reader which you would prefer to do, follow orders or be part of a group? The latter proposition achieved the same results but was infinitely more attractive than the former would have been. At another point in the class, a queue of six children had formed beside the teacher’s table to show her that they had completed the task they had been given. In that moment, the teacher realised that it would be impractical to have every single child come and show her that they had finished. So she cast a quick eye over the queuing children to make sure there were no serious queries or concerns. Then, rather than tell the children to sit down, she simply stated: ‘There’s no queue’. Since there was no queue, there was no point in queueing and the line of waiting children slowly disintegrated, each returning to their places. Finally, when two students were out of their chairs pulling each other about. Their teacher calmly stated: ‘There’s no play fighting’. continued 

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In each of these instances, my own tendency would have been to use a direct imperative such as: ‘Jaime, sit down!’ or: ‘Go back to your places.’ or: ‘Stop fighting, you two.’ The way María José framed her message though, there were no win/lose situations, just the way that things were. Ever since, I have tried to frame my own classroom instruction in a similar way, whenever possible.

Encouraging your learners to use English Provide opportunities for learners to switch back from L1 Inevitably there will be times when a student comes to you and speaks in their L1. One approach is to give them the English and ask them to repeat, as explained in Chapter 1. A slightly subtler approach, to be used occasionally, is outlined below.

Figure 2.10: Arthur is a simple sketch but he becomes a character who ‘speaks’ to the children through the teacher.

This is Arthur, a frog-like creature (first mentioned in Roland, 2011). You can draw a version of him on your board. If you put him in one of the upper corners, your students will be less able to modify or erase him. This will increase Arthur’s chances of survival considerably.

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Apart from arousing curiosity, Arthur has another purpose. He is a codeswitching device by which you can encourage students to try to reformulate their L1 utterances in English. If a child requests something from you in their L1, for example, to repeat a popular activity from last lesson, you can refer the request to Arthur and in doing so, introduce an element of play which is much more palatable to them than simply saying: ‘No, Spanish/ Greek/Japanese/Russian’ or ‘In English’. So, the teacher says: ‘I don’t know. Try asking Arthur.’ The thing about Arthur is that he only understands English. The students can address him directly with their questions but Arthur will reply via the teacher (who, oddly enough, is the only one that can hear him). In this aspect, Arthur works in a similar way to Jonathan the pico whom we met in the introduction. Sometimes Arthur might give a straightforward answer such as ‘Arthur says yes, we can play that game again later’, or he might ask the student a question of his own first. Occasionally, if it is not going to cause too much of a distraction, I take Arthur a little further. He might ask a student to draw him a plate of meatballs or a bowl of grapes at the bottom of the board because he is hungry. Later, when nobody is looking, I rub one or two of them out so the students can see that he has been snacking.

Experiment until you get the recipe right Time and time again in the young learner classroom, teachers might find that there is a double dimension to what they are doing. Any activity, technique or decision will have its upside and its downside. The secret is in using a pinch of this and a pinch of that to keep things moving forward. The benefits of taking a few seconds to indulge one or two students in a make-believe conversation with Arthur need to be weighed against the competing demands of the other children in the room. If one student’s conversation with Arthur is starting to attract too much attention and take other students off task, you can either make that conversation a wholeclass activity for a few minutes or you can simply explain that Arthur has suddenly gone to sleep – which he is has a tendency to do. He might wake up and go to sleep a number of times in the same lesson, to suit the teacher, but when he is asleep, nothing will wake him up.

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Trial alternative devices At the time of writing, I have just introduced one class to Barbara Bone, left over from a chicken stew I made at home (Figure 2.11). With very young learners I might not use something quite so macabre (see Mini Chalk Man in Figure 2.11), but these were old enough for the slightly bizarre combination of an animal bone wearing a neon necktie to arouse interest. (I have some fluorescent green and some red polka dotted ribbon for Barbara so that her clothing can change every now and then.)

Figure 2.11: Barbara Bone and Mini Chalk Man, another longtime favourite, are both inexpensive ways of creating a 3D code switching device

As a whole-class activity, we had a round of student-generated questions for her, including, What’s your favourite colour? (it was brown, the colour of corn) and What’s your favourite food? (it was worms). On this occasion, I mediated telepathically with Barbara, almost like a medium would do. This involved me closing my eyes and making quite a dramatic chicken sound before supplying her answers. Now that the novelty of Barbara has settled down somewhat, I will go on to use her just like Arthur. Again, these characters are not enough to base a whole lesson around and they will not mean that your children speak English all of the time. They are more than simple cute additions, however. They are potentially useful props for you to draw upon now and again so that classroom management feels like play.

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Enjoying your time in the classroom Savour the special moments We have looked at managing unwanted behaviour, classroom dynamics and mechanisms for switching to English. Again, though, I would like to stress how the teacher’s experience of their young learner classes will swing like a pendulum between this kind of event management and savouring moments along the way. Little children can be funny. They come out with all sorts of comments. Here are two anecdotes to give you more of a flavour of what I am referring to. Javier was six. He came up to me one day: Javier: Teacher, your brain grows roots into your body. Is that right? Teacher: Well, you could see it that way, yes. Javier: And ideas come up from the roots. Teacher: Mmm, maybe. Javier: Wait! [and he froze completely still on the spot]… I’m having an idea! I felt honoured to witness such moment of true inspiration. Another student, also six, recently explained to me that he had lost a front tooth when he accidentally hit himself in the mouth with a tennis racket. ‘When I’m seven, my tooth will grow back.’ ‘When you’re seven?’ ‘On my seventh birthday, it will grow back.’ He was seven a few months ago. I have not mentioned anything about the tooth since, but it seems we are still waiting. These moments are fleeting. Immediately after an exchange that tickles you, you might be called on by another child because somebody has taken the crayon she was using and the mood, from your perspective, shifts. Again, try to enjoy the funny parts while tending to logistics and learning.

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Run on the ‘little you’, at least some of the time As we have already seen, if you are a slightly quieter, more retiring person, you may need to run on the ‘big you’. Conversely, however, if you are an outgoing teacher with a more dominating presence in the first place, you may need to practise sometimes running on the ‘little you’. There are a number of reasons for this. In terms of loudness, if a teacher blasts away with their voice at maximum volume, most of the children will soon get used to this. This then leaves the teacher nowhere to go if they later need to emphasise their message. Secondly, if the teacher is extremely ‘shouty’ the children may well get louder themselves, too. Thirdly, this will leave the teacher much more tired at the end of the day, week or year. There is another, more subtle, reason why it might sometimes be good to keep a check on how intensely you are projecting your personality. Look at the following dialogue, in which Victoria and her six-year-old son, Jonah, meet one of Victoria’s friends, Penny, while out shopping. The dialogue is based on a conversation I recently witnessed. Victoria: Hi there Penny! [To Jonah] Look who it is! You remember Penny, don’t you? Jonah: … Victoria: Of course you do! Say Hello to Penny! Jonah: … Penny: Ah! He’s shy. Hello Jonah. You remember me don’t you? Look how you’ve grown. How old are you now? Victoria: He’s six now, aren’t you J. Tell Penny. Jonah: … Victoria: I don’t know what’s happened to him today. [To Jonah] Tell Penny about the birthday party we’ve just come from. Penny: Ooh, have you just come from a party? Victoria: Yes we have. And we’ve had cake and jelly, too. Rather than the useful sort of scaffolding that developmental psychologist Jerome Bruner (1983) talks about, and which will be covered later, this ‘antiscaffolding’ reduces Jonah’s motivation to speak of his own initiative. It robs him of agency.

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As a collective, English language teachers, at every level, be it primary, secondary or adult, do tend to squeeze out our students’ opportunities to speak by blathering on from the front. At young learner level, this often involves reducing their contributions to one-word answers. In the case of quieter students, it is worth asking yourself now and again: What makes my quiet students quiet? Have I made sure that it isn’t me?

Do not try to do it all from scratch When you start with a new young learner class, remember, it will seldom be their first English class. They will normally have had numerous English teachers and will often have shared the last one together as a group. You may well see evidence of the systems which that teacher put in place, such as standardised behaviours and expectations. These are the leftovers of someone else’s hard work. These leftovers will be particularly evident right at the start of the year, before you have established your own way of doing things. You may, for instance, see that a class all put their hands up when they want to give an answer. This will be because their previous teacher insisted upon this and managed to instill it as a norm. If you begin accepting answers that are shouted out by one or two students who have not put their hand up, you will disrupt this norm and ultimately it will become discarded. Similarly, if you find your students coming to you and asking if they should use pen or pencil, this is because their previous teacher made it something that mattered. It is possible to reinstall a system you have ignored but it takes a little more work. Therefore, before you tell the children it does not matter and that they can use whatever they want to write with, it is worth asking yourself what the advantages of having them write in one or the other might be and whether you wish to continue to specify this at the start of each task. In fact, a very worthwhile goal for the first and second lessons with any new group is to actively look for systems that the previous teacher has put in place, decide which ones you want to retain, and to reaffirm them early on. Roisin O’Farrell, coursebook author and head of young learner studies at ELI, Seville, actively encourages her teachers to pass this valuable information on. At the end of each academic year, teachers of children aged 3–10 are asked to fill out a form profiling each of their groups, providing details of particularly successful or popular routines and classroom

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management strategies that have worked. This is an example of how we can encourage and structure best practice in an unobtrusive way, at an institutional level.

Just try your best Several years ago, the centre where I was teaching decided to open its doors and invite the parents of younger children to come and observe a class in the early part of the year. These parents were also asked to fill in simple feedback forms which contained the questions: Was the class what you expected? Does your child like coming to class? Do you have any other comments? One father wrote this about the class that he saw me teach: Better than I expected! It was fun, dynamic and motivating for the children. The teacher is doing an excellent job. They should teach English like this in all the schools. The father of one of the other students wrote: It was more or less what I expected. The children were very rowdy. The teacher should impose more order. That was two parents watching the same teacher give the same class. One of them burst into my director’s office full of enthusiasm and praise straight after the class. The other stood at the back of the class, refusing to sit down with his arms crossed for the whole lesson. Which of them was right? Both were and neither were. I keep these two forms as a reminder that there will always be people who say good things about your classes and make you feel great. There will always be people who criticise what you are doing and make you doubt yourself. How good your classes really are will normally be somewhere in between. The trick, therefore, is to take a little bit of notice of both but not too much of either. As mentioned above, everything we do in class can at the same time be called into question just as it can be commended. As teacher, I recommend that you make your decisions based on as much informed reflection and planning as you have time for and then you decide how well things turned out. 

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So, to sum up, think about the following ideas and try to incorporate them into your future classes: try not to let points get in the way of your teaching; do your best to avoid stand-offs; give students turnaround time; think about when it is appropriate to couch classroom instructions in the students’ local language; allow space for your students’ voices; and finally, make the most of the previous teacher’s hard work.

Questions for reflection ■■ Are your students behaving like José or Alice, as described in the chapter?

If so, do you think speaking to the parents concerned would help and, in a more extreme case, do you think a structured daily report like the one shown might be useful? ■■ You have read about various types of class mascot that have ‘conversations’ with the class. These conversations can be geared to practise particular language points. How easy would you find mediating such an ‘exchange’ and what language would you include for your groups? ■■ The chapter ended with an anecdote about receiving praise and criticism. When was the last time you received feedback on your teaching and did you take too much, too little or just enough notice of it?

Things to try 1. Look again at the different ways of using points described in this chapter (such as H points, picture points and team points on a mini board). Then have a think about whether any of your own points systems could be modified or added to. 2. Monitor your students’ use of L1 in class. When do they switch to L1 and what are the most effective cues to get them back to speaking in English? You may then start to incorporate those cues into your regular practice. 3. When talking to parents about their children’s behaviour, try to expand the conversation to include language progress. It is very easy to focus on the challenging aspect of the behaviour but it is worth remembering that order, discipline and self-control (whatever your preferred terminology) exists so that learning can take place. Where a child’s conduct is getting in the way of your teaching, it will also be getting in the way of their learning. Explain that because of the behaviour, their child’s language uptake is being affected and that they might not reach the targets specified for this particular year. Most parents are not teachers and this is a little easier for them to understand and also a little closer to home in terms of priorities.

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Further reading Bruner J (1983) Child’s Talk: Learning to use language. New York: Norton. Montessori M (1965) Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook. New York: Schocken Books. Riley DA (1997) The Defiant Child. New York: Taylor Trade Publishing. Roland C (2011) I’ll definitely try that in my primary classroom. APAC Quarterly Magazine. Barcelona: Associació de Professors i Professores d’Anglès de Catalunya. October Nº71, pp. 30–36.

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Chapter 3: What is creative young learner teaching? Everyone knows that creative teacher. They are always doing something exciting in their classroom. They seem to be naturally talented, be it at music, drawing, painting, crafts, acting or singing. In addition, that creative teacher seems to be able to pluck ideas out of thin air. I have been that creative teacher many times. There have also been periods of time when I did not feel like that creative teacher at all. In this chapter, I will argue that creativity in the classroom is not a single thing, and that useful creativity is not inherent to people, but rather is a composite of previous experience, of thinking about language in the classroom and of learned processes related to organisation and dynamics – all of which are accessible to everyone. In a book with the word ‘fun’ in the title, I think this is an important issue to look at.

A closer look You might see another teacher who is doing cool things in their classroom and think to yourself: Wow, I wish I had their imagination! or I’m not as creative as they are. Let us deconstruct what is usually described as ‘creative teaching’ so that we can better see what is actually going on and where its true value lies. I believe 100% that creative teaching (and I mean effective and useful teaching too) is the result of a process, and not the result of some innate quality on the part of individual teachers. If we can understand that process, we can open it up and make it accessible to everyone. Labelling certain teachers as ‘gifted’, ‘talented’ or ‘creative’ does no real good to those teachers or to their colleagues. Very little happens by magic

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in the language classroom. Everything is the result of something else. In this case, that something else is normally hard work and time spent thinking about the job. I would like to divide what is normally considered as creative young learner teaching into separate areas. I mentioned three elements: previous experience, thinking about language and learned processes related to organisation and dynamics. These translate into the range of activity types you employ, how you connect language to those activities and the fine-tuning of your task design (such as set-up, instructions and supervision).

Range of activity types By ‘range’, I mean the variety and scope of activities a teacher chooses to run in their classes from week to week. We can identify the activity type by asking ourselves: what are the children actually doing? What is the basic operation being performed through the medium of English? Is it painting, building, questioning, remembering, recognising, describing, jumping, throwing, guessing, predicting, singing, acting, dancing or drawing? Some teachers use a wider range of activity types and others a narrower range. In general, I feel that a wide variety of classroom activities is a good thing, and hope that is what you will find in this book. However, when a teacher is employing a wide range of activities, this can give the illusion that ideas pop out of nowhere for them. Where do ideas really come from? They come from things we have already seen. We might draw a parallel with something we have previously experienced or we might connect two things we already know, to create a hybrid variation. As a case in point, I was recently thinking about all the things I had been allowed to do in and around my home as a child. Then came a sudden realisation that these were mirrored by many of the things I do with my own young learners. I was encouraged to grow vegetables, and was shown how to collect and sort seeds. I was allowed to erect makeshift dens for myself and my brother, as well as scramble about under, in and on, various wooden constructions. I could move the furniture in my room around whenever I wanted – providing the new layout was reasonably sensible. I got to throw darts and ninja stars

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at wooden targets, under supervision, as well as practising the javelin, discus and shotput. I made things out of bread dough, homemade modelling clay, plaster of Paris and papier-mâché. I was also allowed to experiment in the kitchen, where my favourite things to make were peppermint creams and Cornish pasties. I was taken to forests and small local wildlife centres. I also had a collection of coins and some 17th century musket balls found on the local common with a metal detector. My early years at school were, and are, a similar source of inspiration. I was very lucky.

Figures 3.1–3.3: Vegetable plot and greenhouse for growing, our play cabin (getting an emphatic thumbs-up from the author’s brother) and an early makeshift den.

Many of the classroom activities described in this book have their roots in those early days – growing things, experimenting with space, throwing things and using a range of foodstuffs and modelling materials. As far as range of activities goes, my point is that I have not invented anything. I am simply passing on what I have been lucky enough to witness, be part of and enjoy. There is nothing really original. Our previous experience is a resource bank of stored ideas that can be called upon to widen the scope of what we include in the classroom. This resource bank is often mistaken for imagination. It is not quite imagination, though. All our ideas come from somewhere. They are transmitted to us or they are borrowed and that is very good news indeed. It means that at any point in our teaching lives we can expand the range of activities we are running with our YLs by simply exposing ourselves to more things. You do not have to have had a kaleidoscope of childhood exploits to include variety in your classroom. As an adult, you can also increase your bank of stored ideas. One of the easiest ways to do so is to walk into a colleague’s

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classroom and chat to them about what they are doing. Throughout the book I have named many colleagues I have learned from like this. Teaching conferences are another place to pick up new ideas or be reminded of ones that you have allowed to go dormant. Websites and social media abound with ideas for YL classes. Recently, I used ideas from the STEAM Education website (steameducation.wordpress.com), and ended up making marshmallow and spaghetti towers with my students (see Figures 3.4–3.6). We ended up with a sticky floor from the marshmallows and not all of the structures were as ‘free-standing’ as others, but this activity occasioned multiple requests for materials and conversations about shapes.

Figures 3.4–3.6: Making marshmallow and spaghetti towers

Methodology articles and books are also a reliable place to look, as I hope this one is. I have already mentioned the Montessori handbook that is still giving me ideas over 100 years after its first publication. Non-ELT literature, such as that of mainstream education, storytelling, literacy, art and developmental psychology, can also provide a rich picking ground for ideas.

Connecting language to activities While a wide range of activities can be fun and exciting, on its own, it is neither sustainable, nor does it constitute good language teaching. If you have come up with something novel to do in class without considering the language learning implications, you will not have much of an answer when a colleague or parent asks you, ‘But what are they going to learn from it?’

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The second step in the process of creative YL teaching is connecting the activity you have in mind to some language structure, function or vocabulary that will be manageable and useful to your students. Our remit, as ELT practitioners, is to teach words and sentences in English. If you have a class of seven-year-olds jumping up and down, as a language teacher, your primary goal is not to improve their jumping per se. Rather, it is to use the basic operation of jumping to teach a facet of language. We use A to teach B. On a very basic level, you could use jumping to teach the commands Jump! Start! and Stop! You could also connect the action to a higher level of language by including adverbs: Jump slowly! Jump quickly! Jump high! Jump quietly! Taking the level of language even higher, you could use jumping, running and walking (on the spot) to introduce comparative adverbs, as in: Jump higher! Jump more softly! Run faster! Walk more slowly! I first saw this activity in a lesson given by a colleague, Anthony Hiddens. You can also use the basic function of jumping, but move away from the word jump itself. More recently, another colleague, Jenny Wright, showed me an activity where she had a line of flashcards on the floor and one student on either side of this line. They had to jump to the left or to the right, according to which card she called out.

Figures 3.7–3.9: Students on either side of the row of cards jump sideways to the one that the teacher calls out.

Here, the base function was jumping, but the language connected to it was a lexical set of words related to children’s leisure activities. Indeed, tied to the jumping in this way, it could have been a lexical set related to anything.

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In your planning, you might start thinking about an activity and then how to connect language to it or you might do things the other way around, starting with the language then connecting the activity. For example, a teacher may have comparative adjectives on their structural syllabus, and then notice that the crayons in their class materials box are different lengths. This could prompt them to devise an activity where children compare a handful of crayons to their partner’s. The language might be: ‘My blue is longer than your red.’ ‘My green is shorter than your yellow.’ ‘My pink is lighter than your pink.’ ‘My brown is sharper than your blue.’ Each time a successful sentence is made, that learner gets to take the particular crayon belonging to the partner they included in their sentence. The ability to make connections between things is something else that is often labelled a ‘gift’. Being able to move between ideas with a degree of flexibility is desirable. Too many ideas can equally be a hindrance that results in a certain personal chaos. Ideas might run together and become confusing, too many things might occur at the same time, or there might be a temptation to move sideways, jumping from one idea to the next without staying on track to think any one of them through properly. In such cases we need to test and tidy our own thinking in a process of internal quality control. We can do so by asking ourselves honestly: Am I doing this activity just because I want to, or is there really a solid connection between the activity and the language? How you connect language to an activity is a small but essential step. Occasionally, a random flash of brilliance or a lucky idea will help you. Most of the time, however, sitting down with a notebook and/or a copy of our language syllabus with a mug of coffee is a good start. Choosing what language to connect to an activity gets easier the more language you have taught, but it is a skill that needs developing and that needs a certain amount of quality time allotting to it.

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Task design The final element in the process of creative young learner teaching is task design. This is how teachers structure, stage, explain and sustain student activity. It is how they shape and convey the task. It is how they make sure that all the children in their class can actually perform the activity, and that they can do so productively and in a way that can be measured, evaluated and built on. In a nutshell, it is how they make things work. One important part of task design is set-up. Think about how to phrase your instructions. Whether it is a game, a worksheet, a craft or some acting, a demonstration will usually help at least as much and probably more than an explanation. Another element of task design is the logistics of an activity. This includes thinking about the number of children that will get to have a go at any given activity and trying to maximise that. As we saw in Chapter 1, when putting questions to the class, there are small strategies you can employ to increase the number of respondents. Task design also involves trying to reduce the number of children who are waiting for their turn. See Chapter 10 for more on task design with specific reference to games. In Jenny’s activity, where the children were jumping sideways along the line of flashcards, I suggested a small tweak to increase the number of students participating at any one time. In my new version of the game, there were two children on either side of the line of flashcards, one behind the other.

Figures 3.10–3.12: With a simple tweak, twice the number of students can participate at any one time.

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In this way, the number of players participating at any one time increased from two to four. Even in a class of 20, four students out at the front doing something rather than two is a significant shift. With more space, this could possibly be increased to six. Another important aspect of task design has to do with the help that students will need to perform a task and how we provide that help. If you have created your own wordsearch activity using online software, you need to make sure that the learners have seen those words before and preferably have access to them – either at the bottom of the page or as a list on the board. If your craft activity requires students to push a brass splitter pin through several pieces of card so that the big hand and the small hand move round on a clock face, you need to decide if they are going to be able to do that themselves or if they are going to need help. If they are going to need help, you need to try to avoid a bottleneck situation, where they are all waiting for assistance. You might do so by either providing clock faces and hands with a hole for the splitter pin already made or by helping a student the moment that they finish the previous stage of cutting and colouring the clock face, so a queue of waiting students never accumulates. You could also try being a little pre-emptive like Cristina in Chapter 2, doing this for some of them just before they finish, so you spread your teacher support out more evenly over the lesson. Another important part of task design relates to motive and motivation. At the planning stage, there are questions to ask yourself concerning the micro-mechanics of each activity. Here are some of them: at each phase of the activity, what will keep your learners on task? What reason will they have to say the language that you are trying to tie to the activity? How will you know if they have said it? What will happen when they say it? What will happen if they do not? How long will the activity last? Will there be possible shortcuts that the children might try to take that reduce their exposure to and/or practice of the target language? What will the activity look like as it is in progress? Where will the teacher sit or stand? What sort of supervision will the children require? Will there be a tangible outcome or an end product? Will there be praise or recognition, such as a tick next to the name of students who have finished a task or a positive comment or smiley face in their book each time they complete an exercise?

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These questions all correspond to tiny adjustments that will make or break a task. In every chapter of this book, whatever principles we are exploring, we have had and will always have one eye on this dimension of our teaching and will repeatedly come back to these questions. If this all sounds like a nightmare of considerations, let us look at it from a slightly different perspective, by way of a story (first told in Roland, 2014).

Figure 3.13: A mini-circuit like this provides both limitation and structure.

In the public square of Tomares, a village near Seville where I lived for many years, the council would set up a mini-funfair for children every year. One day, while taking my morning coffee in that square, I noticed a little girl on a pink bicycle. She was riding round an unfinished hay bale circuit that would later be filled in with sand for go-karts, pictured above. She rode round and round until, too tired to pedal, she got off the bike and pushed it around the circuit.

Figure 3.14: A path that twists and turns can appeal to children, even if it means covering more distance.

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The same can be said of this easy-access path, which snakes up either side of some steps in repeated figures of eight, in the mining village of Lieres near Oviedo. I am sure the reader can imagine children letting go of their mothers’ hands to race up or down the twisty path. My point is this: the track and the path actually restrict the children’s movement. The little girl had less than a third of the total space in the square and the twisty path is by far the longer way up or down. Both the track and the path also provide comfort and structure, however, because they shape the child’s journey. Task design in the classroom is a similar thing. When a child asks: ‘Teacher, what do I have to do?’, it is actually a call for you to use your adult imagination to create a path for them to follow.

Case study: Creativity failing I had been teaching young learners for two years and wanted to get a new group of four- and five-year-olds practising the colours. I had a set of coloured mats, which I spread out over the floor. My idea was that the children would step from one mat to another, each time saying the colour of the mat they were moving to. At the time, this seemed a reasonable link between activity and language, but I therefore needed some reason for them to stay on the mats. ‘You can’t touch the floor,’ I told them ‘because… it’s water and there are crocodiles in the water’. In terms of task design, one important oversight was that there was no consequence to the children saying or not saying the colour of the mats. There was nothing to hold them to the language requirements of the game. The other oversight was even more serious. I realised that I needed some reason for them to move around the different mats rather than stay stationary on the mat they were on. So, I added another element. ‘I am a monster. I am going to move from mat to mat, slowly. You need to escape from me.’ Once the children were each on a mat ready to start, I added one last element. In order to make my movements more random, and I thought fairer, I put a continued 

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bucket over my head. I then lifted my arms in Frankenstein’s monster style, made a low moaning sound and took a step towards another mat, which I could see near me from my limited circle of vision. Unfortunately, the level of tension I had created far outweighed the rest of the rules of the game and the children all ran shrieking and squealing to the edges and corners of the room. The two-metre 100-kilo bucket-headed figure towering above them was just too much. It took several minutes to calm everyone down and I have not tried to play ‘The Monster and the Mats’ ever since. Were I to redesign the task now, I would have the children jump from mat to mat in order to get somewhere, perhaps working against the clock. I would station a monitor or judge at each mat whose job it was to ask the student who had just hopped onto it: What colour is this mat? I would have them reply with another full sentence: It’s an orange mat. They would not able able to take off for the next mat until that judge had given them a green flag (by literally waving a green flag or saying: Correct!). The looming, shuffling figure of the teacher making zombie sounds would be entirely absent in my newer version of the game. Teaching does not happen in a vacuum. We have busy timetables, other classes, our own children, pets, families, homelife, health issues and obligations to attend to. However, when we do find time to think beforehand about what each child will be doing, from their perspective, at each moment of the lesson, then the paths that we lay out will be easier for our learners to follow and the journey will be more convincing and productive. Task design is a very real skill. It takes years of crafting. I have drawn upon 20 years of teaching young learners to write this book. It is no accident, however, that out of the several hundred activities recommended in it, almost none of them come from my first five years of teaching. I had lots of ideas during that time but I was still learning about how groups of children work.

Remember the motto ‘one simple thing’ In terms of task design, with every activity, there is nearly always one simple thing that could be done better. For example, you will remember that in the bolt activity from Chapter 2, I had written the days of the week on the nuts with pen.

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Figure 3.15: Every time you repeat an activity with your students, there is an opportunity to make adjustments.

The printed letters in my revised version of the toy, in Figure 3.15, are easier for the students to recognise. Whether it is by adding supporting language, organising your board or distribution of materials better, improving instructions, making a worksheet clearer, giving the children an example or introducing more effective groupings, there is always something we can do to make a task run a little more smoothly.

A complete process We have identified three elements: 1. drawing upon a range of activities 2. connecting language to them 3. effectively designing tasks. All three must happen together. Without the last two, range on its own is nothing. It is little use bringing lots of ideas home from a teaching conference if you cannot make them work in your own class. Similarly, you might have amazing materials, but without well-planned logistics, chaos is likely to ensue. The good news is that wherever you start in terms of skill set – be it imagination, language or classroom management and organisation – the three areas can all be consciously worked on. In this chapter I have tried to break down and, to a certain extent, debunk the idea of the creative or talented

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teacher as thing-in-themselves. There are multiple avenues to success, and we can all move forwards along them in a variety of ways. As you do so in your own way, I recommend making a list of any key factors that you see making or breaking the activities that you try. This list can then form the basis of your own principles for successful young learner teaching. This is exactly how my own list, presented in the introduction of this book, was compiled.

Creativity budget I would like to end this chapter with a call to school owners and heads of departments. Young learner teaching often requires some sort of outlay on materials. In my experience, at least, having a range of materials does improve lessons if those materials are used wisely and carefully. Such materials might include sticky tack, glitter, modelling clay, coloured foam, fabric paints, construction or hardware materials, soil and seeds or foodstuffs. Most schools supply something in the way of materials, but often teachers are left to pick up the tab themselves if they want to include anything considered non-essential or unusual. That means all over the world there are teachers spending the money that schools give them for teaching… on teaching. Conversely, those running schools or departments are understandably hesitant to throw money at teachers with no guarantee that the materials they buy will result in classes that are more productive in terms of real language teaching. I would therefore like to suggest, whenever possible, that a budget be set aside for materials at a centre level and that any teacher wishing to dip into that fund complete a form like the one on page 76 (also available as Downloadable resource 3). If a teacher has thought about all of the questions on this form, the lesson that they give with those materials is already likely to be of a higher standard and worth investing in.

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School Academy Materials fund request form Briefly describe the materials you need money for and their estimated cost: Please outline below how you intend to use the materials, how they will fit into your lesson and what they will add to it. What specific language will be tied to the materials? Will the materials be used in a one-off lesson or re-used over several lessons? If this is a more permanent resource, could the materials be used by other teachers? To be completed after the lesson/s: How do you feel the lesson/s went?

Do you feel expenditure on the materials was worth it?

Would you do the same lesson again?

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So, to sum up, think about the following points and try to incorporate them into your future classes: ■■ Structured and productive fun in the classroom is the result of composite

skills. ■■ All of these composite skills can be practised, learned and improved upon. ■■ Task design in particular is something that takes years to master. ■■ Keeping a list of your own emerging principles of practice is worthwhile.

Questions for reflection ■■ Look back at the three elements described as necessary for successful

creative teaching: range of activities, connecting language to activities and task design. Which of these would you say is your strongest point and which is the area you most need to work on? ■■ The chapter describes numerous ways in which teachers can get new ideas. Are any of these ones that you could explore further yourself? ■■ You will notice that both in Chapter 3 and throughout the rest of the book, I make frequent reference to my colleagues as a source of inspiration. Is your relationship to your current colleagues similar to the one described? Is there anything you could do to nurture a more collaborative relationship with your colleagues?

Things to try 1. Spend some time looking at either Montessori’s handbook and/or STEAM websites. Both of these have been sources of inspiration for me, and maybe they will be so for you as well. 2. Choose one or two classroom activities this week and monitor your students’ performance and progress. Where do they have difficulties and what type of queries and requests for help do you get? What can you tweak to make those activities run a little more smoothly? You may try making these adjustments during the task itself or wait until the next time you run those same activities. 3. Begin to explore and form your own theory of successful young learner teaching. This is not as daunting an undertaking as it may sound. For each successful activity you run, note down the deciding factor, as you perceived it, that contributed to success. This can be the start of your list of best principles, similar to the one presented on pages 14–15, – one that you can use as a guide for future planning.

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Further reading Montessori M (1965) Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook. New York: Schocken Books. Roland C (2014) Effective task design. English Teaching professional 95 pp22–24.

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Chapter 4: Language content 1 – Teaching words and sentences A guiding maxim Whatever their age, I say to my young learners: ‘Everything we do here is to get you practising words and sentences in English. Did you know that? That’s the only reason we do things in this class. It might be colouring, doing a worksheet, making something or playing a game – it’s all to get you saying and writing words and sentences in English.’ Sometimes it comes as a surprise to them and sometimes it does not, but I always find it helps focus the class. It makes them just a little more cooperative when they are being asked to repeat a sentence I have just given them or they do not feel like labelling their drawing. I recommend that you trial a version of that explanation too, and see where it takes you. Before we go on to look at linking language to fun activities in the next chapter and the rest of the book, let us have a very quick look at the basic processes we will be relying on when it comes to teaching those words and sentences in English.

Understanding words when they are written down A lot of what younger learners will be doing when it comes to written text is bottom-up decoding. By this we mean starting with the first letter of a word, going on to the next one and building things up bit by bit. At the same time that a child is doing this, they will be internally sub-vocalising what they imagine the corresponding sounds of these letter combinations are. If

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they find a partial match to a spoken word that they already know, they may try to jump from this slow construction process to the end by making a guess at the word. If they do not find a match, they may get to the end of the word and still be trying to figure out if it is one that they know. If they are using their first language system to interpret the letters, this may still require something of a jump. For example, Spanish learners will often read ‘purple’ as ‘pur-pl-e’, in phonemic script /pɜːple/, rather than / pɜːpəl/. I see them mouthing the former, then there is a little Ah! moment when they realise it must be ‘purple’. The irregularity of sound–spelling correspondence in English also makes things tricky. Various synthetic phonics teaching systems try to help keep the reader on track as they work right through the word, reproducing its sounds more accurately.

Whole-word recognition Once a child has encountered and decoded a word numerous times, they will start to recall its shape and sound from memory, without having to go through the process of building it up from scratch. We call this whole-word recognition. This is what will enable them to read words, then sentences and later whole pages more fluidly and easily. Ideally, we want to get our students to the point where they can quickly recognise all the core vocabulary items on the syllabus we are covering.

Watching the process at work I have sat with many children and watched them trying to read. As a volunteer at a UK village school in the mid-90s, that is all I did for several months – sit alongside upper-primary students on a one-to-one basis and work through their readers with them, word by word and line by line. Sometimes a student would guess at a word too quickly and get it wrong. Sometimes they would not look closely enough at the word at all and start guessing at random – in which case I would draw their attention back to the start of the word, provide verbal cues or remind them about where we had seen the word previously in their story. Years later, I taught these same strategies to my students who were learning English as a foreign language. Ana was five years old and was struggling to match the colour words in her coursebook to the corresponding swatches of colour.

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‘Let’s take the first two letters of this word,’ I said to her and covered up the rest. ‘What would they sound like together?’ ‘Bl,’ she replied. ‘Okay. Now, there are only two colours that start like this, black and blue. So if the next letter is an a [/æ/] it has to be bla… bla…?’ ‘Black.’ ‘And if it isn’t an a it has to be blue. Shall we see?’ ‘It’s black!’ ‘Now let’s look at the next one. This is even easier. The first two letters are gr. Can you think of a colour that starts with gr…?’ ‘Green!’ ‘And this one: pi… pi…?’ ‘Pink!’ Ana took a big breath and her eyes widened. ‘I can read!’ she exclaimed. This fairly rudimentary beginner’s class in decoding was what Ana needed to take her to the next step in her reading. Needless to say, it was one of the highlights of my year. I have mentioned both the primary school and Ana in the above two anecdotes to try to convey how the act of sitting with students as they read has been insightful to me. For a more in-depth look at early learning and literacy, I would recommend Schickedanz and Collins’ So Much More Than the ABCs (2013).

Understanding words when they are said Many songs and sequences of classroom language such as: ‘Here you are.’ ‘Thank you.’ ‘You’re welcome.’ … are things that your students will hear before they see them in print. They will pick up this language by hearing it from you or on an audio and repeating, each time getting a little closer to the model. The same is true of vocabulary presented using flashcard images only. The big question, however, is this: do they know what they are actually saying? To make the point, there are two anecdotes that I regularly tell (Roland, 2008; 2016), and will do so once again here.

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Gaucho nein A friend and colleague at ELI, Terry Ware, and I found the following table, completed by a student, on the floor of a classroom after lessons one day.

Gaucho nein?

Mi nein es María.

Gaucho nein?

Mi nein es Pedro.

Gaucho nein?

Mi nein es Marta.

Gaucho nein?

Mi nein es Lucas.

This questionnaire-type grid had been left by a seven-year-old who had gone around asking his classmates their names in a mingle activity, filling in the second column as he did so. His own rendering of What’s your name? shows that he was hearing something very different from what his teacher imagined him to be hearing. This might have worked for him in the short term, but would not have helped him much later on.

Sona lena tina When I was at primary school, our music teacher taught us Frère Jacques (often translated to Brother John) in French. There is a line in that song which reads: Sonnez les matines, sonnez les matines (Ring the morning bells, ring the morning bells). However, we never actually saw the words to the song and so I happily sang my own nonsensical version: Sona lena tina, sona lena tina …throughout my middle and upper-primary years.

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Bringing sound and word together We see, therefore, not only how the written form of a word can affect pronunciation (as in the example of purple above), but also how only hearing the spoken form of a word can affect spelling and the child’s whole conception of a word or phrase. In order to bring sound and word together, there are a few strategies we can employ. First, ask students to repeat words or phrases slowly. This will help you to see where they are placing word boundaries and if individual sounds are being articulated clearly. Secondly, try to make sure that they at least see the written form of the language that they regularly hear at some point, including everyday classroom sequences. It is possible that the sentences: ‘Can I go to the toilet, please?’ and ‘Can I borrow a pencil, please?’ are not actually in your coursebook. The next time a child makes a request like this, listen very carefully. Are they really getting it right or does it just sound similar? Thirdly, you can do some explicit awareness-raising by putting classroom language like the following on the board: Can I have a pencil sharpener, please? And asking: Which of these words is pronounced ‘have’? Which word means… [teacher points at themselves or uses L1 for ‘I’] What does the last word mean?

Encourage adjustments towards accuracy The more opportunities you can give your students to compare what they are saying with what you are saying, or what they are writing with what you are writing, the better. Each time they do so, there is a chance they will make a small adjustment towards the model you are providing and improve their accuracy. We are working from these basic principles in all the activities in this book. In the rest of the chapter, we will look at a number of strategies to promote familiarity with words and more accurate production.

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Case study: Narrate everything In Saratov, Russia, Ray Arayik Carleni and Anastasia Bykova set up an immersion centre for very young learners called Nova Baby, where a group of children spend up to four hours each morning. One thing I learned while visiting NovaBaby (discussed further in Bykova & Roland, 2019) is to try to narrate everything in English. There is even an explanation of this guiding principle displayed on one of the walls in the centre as a reminder. Teachers and assistants there narrate everything – what they are doing and what the children are doing. Of course, the children will not understand everything, and in classes with fewer contact hours per week, you might feel that items in your teacher narrative might not recur with sufficient frequency for the learners to pick them up. One thing is certainly true though: they will never pick up what they never hear.

‘Sandwiching’ If you are not teaching in an immersion context, you might need to use your students’ first language sometimes. If you do, you can use a technique referred to as sandwiching (Butzkamm & Caldwell, 2009). You say the word in English, followed by your students’ L1 equivalent and then you say it in English one more time – so the English version is the first and the last thing they hear. Encarna Pérez-Pulido at the university of Cáceres, Extremadura, brought this technique to my attention with reference to the work of Philip Kerr (2016), and I have been using it ever since.

Red finger, blue finger A teacher’s aim is to create a situation where their students hear, see and get to say and write the language they are trying to teach them as many times as possible. A perennial favourite with my students and with workshop audiences is this activity. The teacher colours one of his or her index fingers red and the other blue. The teacher then writes two words on the board, one in red and the other in blue. ‘We don’t normally point at people, but this is a game. When I point at you with my red finger, you say the red word. When I point at you with the blue finger say the blue word.’

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The teacher then points at individual children with different fingers in turn, remodelling pronunciation when necessary. This is basic drilling, in a novel form. There are all manner of ways to point at the students including pointing at two different students at the same time, one with each of the coloured fingers, putting your hands together and pointing at the same student with different fingers in rapid succession and moving one arm slowly across the class in a pointing gesture reminiscent of John Travolta in ‘Saturday Night Fever’. This technique is ideal for working singular and plural nouns, especially irregular plural nouns such as: woman women child children person people When working down a list like this, it is important to let the children know which particular pair of words you are focusing on at any one time (i.e. ‘We’re now on child/children’), maybe crossing them off as you work down. This technique can also be used to drill countries vs nationalities such as: France/French, Japan/Japanese, Brazil/Brazilian, etc. If you are working in a context where it is culturally unacceptable to point at people, a very simple tweak is to nominate a student, hold your closed fists in front of you (fingers towards the students) and then to hold alternate index fingers fingers up – so that they look like small creatures popping out of a burrow or wormhole.

‘Say it in the style of…’ Another low-preparation but playful way to encourage students to repeat a word a few more times is to say, for example: Now say it in the style of a cat. …and they repeat the word with a whiny miaow. Now say it in the style of a wolf. …and they howl the word. Now say it in the style of a fly. …and they say the word in a buzz-like way.

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Now say the word like a mouse. …and they squeak the word out. Now say it like a mosquito. …and they use their highest-frequency zzz sound.

A three-dimensional word-guessing game One technique I use is to turn new words into three dimensional objects. I take the word cards (or print my own) then laminate them. After that, I overwrite the words with silicon sealer, as pictured below.

Figures 4.1–4.2: Making 3D word cards with a silicon gun

Then, at any given point in the lesson (but normally with one or two children while the others are doing an activity from their book), a child can be asked to close their eyes and try to guess what the word is by feeling the letters.

Figure 4.3: A student tries to guess the word from touch alone.

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One thing is worth bearing in mind here. It is very hard to predict a word you do not know or cannot remember. Therefore, I tell the student before they feel the card: ‘It is either pink, pen or pencil,’ for example, so that they are operating within a closed set. When they think they know what the first letter or two is they will normally make a prediction, so we see exactly the same decoding process as described earlier but in a tactile version. Below is a set of vocabulary for film genres that I was working with an upper primary group. Here, I used cardboard and large matchsticks as materials.

Figure 4.4: These word cards were made using jumbo-sized matchsticks glued to cardboard.

You may just be able to see in the first of the shots below that as well as the student who I am holding the card for, there is a second student in the background watching (just a small part of her forearm and hand is visible beneath the player’s chin). In terms of classroom management, one very reasonable option might be to send this student back to her place.

Figures 4.5 and 4.6: Upper-primary students guessing from a lexical set of film genres.

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However, if we ask ourselves the question: what exactly is this second student doing right now? The answer will be that she is visually soaking up the sequence of the letters in the word that her classmate is trying to predict. This second student is possibly learning more than the actual player – so providing that she does not disrupt the activity, she stays.

Supported dictations You probably remember dictations and spelling tests from when you were at school. While some children enjoy these, what we want to do in our ELT classrooms is to take out the tension for those who do not. It is worth remembering that whenever we ask a learner to do something with nothing, we create stress. To reduce this, one of my staples in the classroom is what I call ‘supported dictation’. Students each have a writing surface, such as a class set of mini-boards, or they each stand at their own section of a wall-mounted board (if the board is big enough or there are several of them; see more on classroom set-up in Chapter 8). Paper will also serve perfectly. If the dictation is a list of words (more in the style of a traditional spelling test), I encourage them to ask for each item as in: ‘Teacher, what’s number 1?’ because this increases their involvement. I say: ‘Number 1 is …’ and the first item. After a few seconds, I write that word on the board. The deal is that if any student can write it without looking, they can do so, then check and give themselves a tick. If they need to look at my version, they can.

Salt boxes In this classic activity, students work in pairs or groups of three. Give each group a tray, box or box lid with just enough salt in it to cover the surface when the container is gently shaken. The children in each group take turns to write dictated items in the salt before shaking the box to erase their word so that the covering of salt is even once again and ready for their partner’s turn.

Figure 4.7: A salt box dictation

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Keyboard-style delivery Children are used to learning the alphabet sequentially. Sometimes, however, this results in over-reliance on the sequence itself and their not being able to identify letters encountered individually. By writing the numbers in the sequence that they appear on a QWERTY keyboard, as below, or by projecting a simplified version of this (available as Downloadable resource 4 in PPT format), you can change things up and see if your learners can identify the letters in a different order.

Figure 4.8: QWERTY keyboard layout.

You can exploit this resource further by using it as the means to deliver a dictation. Students watch carefully as the teacher taps or shines a laser pointer on the letters of the word they wish to spell out, for example, D-O-L-P-H-I-N-S. Then, when the signal is given, the students either shout out together ‘Dolphins!’ or write that word down. When using this set-up, it is a good idea to establish that there is no shouting out before you have finished indicating letters and that the students have to wait for the teacher’s signal.

Label-makers A Dymo machine is a handheld label-maker that allows the user to print out the letters they wish on embossed tape. I try to have one available in every class. Individually or in pairs, students take turns to print out the vocabulary items that we are currently studying. They then stick their labels on a simple template provided for them.

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Figures 4.9 and 4.10: Students working together on a Dymo machine

This is another way to help them focus on and notice the sequences of letters that make up these words. Again, I provide my own model for them, so that there is support and they have a place to go to check the spelling of the words.

Figure 4.11: Each student completes their own worksheet like this, over the course of the year.

Flashcard towers Many teacher’s packs that accompany published materials include a class set of flashcards to complement the content that the students have in their books. In the activity illustrated on page 91, we are using both word and picture flashcards that correspond to the first three chapters of the coursebook (Corbett & O’Farrell, 2013). We have a lexical set about study

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and the use of information (consisting of phrases such as use a computer, do your homework, listen to stories), another about animals (whales, cheetahs, dolphins) and one about sports (skateboard, do judo, swim). The value of the activity lies in its design. The students are working in pairs and/or groups of three and each has a stack of cards, seen on the floor in the photos. In turn, students take a card and then ask their partner or group members an appropriate question (e.g. ‘Do you read books?’ ‘Do you like kangaroos?’ ‘Can you swim?’) which we have practised before. Only once the question has been answered can the first student try to place another four disposable cups on top of the tower and to balance the card on them (as shown in Figures 4.12 and 4.13). Thanks to Raquel Gorosito Villalobos for first telling me about this activity.

Figures 4.12 and 4.13: Flashcard towers under construction.

Additionally, in each group or pair, one student has been made ‘captain’ and it is their responsibility to make sure that no flashcard is added to the tower without a question having been asked, that neither they nor their partner(s) stray into another group’s space where they might accidentally knock over that group’s tower and that, when their own tower inevitably falls, the cups are collected in an orderly way so they can be used again.

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Here, task design anchors the fun part of the task (building) firmly around the language content. These students are, in effect, revising for their first in-house speaking exams, where they will be presented with similar prompts and required to ask a classmate using the same Do you …? and Can you …? structures. Obviously, what they will remember and what they will talk about is how high the towers got. What they enjoy most is when the towers collapse. However, none of this has come at the cost of solid language practice – quite the opposite – and on the day pictured, the activity ran for more than 20 minutes, much longer than would have been possible if the children had been sitting in their chairs working from the flashcards alone.

The classroom as a language resource The classroom itself affords multiple opportunities to practise naming everyday items that, in some cases, even older students will struggle with. A quick look around the classroom reveals objects that our students continually see, such as plugs, sockets, coat pegs, shelves, an air conditioning unit, a radiator, a projector, a waste paper bin, board rubbers (or wipers), the door handle, a window sill, a fire extinguisher, a plan of the building, a notice board, a clock, speakers, the teacher’s cabinet, drawers, the register, and possibly much more. This is the common space that we share with our students, but not all the objects in it always find their way into coursebooks. You can photograph these objects or find corresponding images on Google to print off and create your own set of classroom object or ‘functional’ flashcards. I always make sure mine include felt-tipped pens, permanent marker, and highlighter pen, as these are items my students never know at the beginning of the year. We can use these as we would any other set of flashcards. They also lend themselves nicely to an extension activity. If we provide the following prompts: It’s a/an… They are… It’s/They’re used for… It’s/They’re made out of… It costs/They cost about… I’ve got/I haven’t got one/some at home. Teachers often wave flashcards in front of their students only to receive minimal responses. In truth, though, this is because these are the only

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responses they have made room for and because they are the responses they expect and accept. By systematically introducing the above prompts, one by one over the course of a term or the whole year, you might reach the point where you can hold up a flashcard of a door handle and without speaking at all, elicit the following from your students: ‘It’s a door handle. It’s used for opening the door. It’s made out of metal. It costs about two euros [rubles, hryvnia, pounds, etc.]. I’ve got one at home.’ In Auguries of Innocence, William Blake suggested we can see the universe in a grain of sand. Here at least we have taken a simple classroom object and drawn out a wider world of language which includes the passive, participles, numbers and materials. There are other prompts that we can add, such as: ‘You can buy it at…’ or ‘It can/can partly/can’t be recycled.’ (first discussed in Roland, 2010).

Taking the colours just a little bit further While teaching at Active Language, Cádiz, a colleague of mine, Natalie Smith, arranged for her niece, who was over with her family on holiday from Liverpool, to visit a number of classes so that our students could get a chance to talk to a British child of their own age. My own upper-primary group prepared a number of questions beforehand, which they asked a little shyly to the nine-year-old newcomer sitting in front of them. ‘What’s your favourite colour?’ was to be expected. Her answer, ‘Sky blue,’ said with a Liverpudlian or ‘scouse’ accent, was not. It completely threw the children. I remember one of them turning to another and saying “¿Sky blue que es eso?” [= Sky blue – what’s that?] The problem is that our students are often burnt out on the basic colours and numbers by the time they reach upper primary. In addition, we tend to restrict those colours to a simple core set and just teach the cardinal numbers in sequence (one, two, three…) rather than adding in ordinals (first, second, third…) and simple fractions, such as half or a quarter. The company Crayola make wax crayons with paper labels on them. Having the colours labelled is an excellent idea, but for our ELT purposes, the names of some of the colours do not always correspond to real colour

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words. Although I love names such as Jazzberry Jam, Timberwolf, Macaroni and Cheese and Inchworm, beyond the immediate context of those particular crayons, students might struggle to convey meaning with them. I encountered a similar problem with paint company leaflets (the sort that have little swatches of colour to show the range the company offers). I therefore made my own colour palette, as shown below.

Figure 4.14: My colour palette

Obviously, colours are, to a certain extent, subjective. We often see a slightly different colour to the person next to us or disagree about what tone to call it. This palette is something I created on PowerPoint based on the colours that I had in my crayon box at school. I offer it as an example rather than a resource. Here is how it works: Teacher: What colour is it? Student: It’s green. Teacher: But what type of green? Student: Lime green, teacher. This year I employed a different strategy and labelled the crayons directly, again using my own terminology for the different shades. I used clear tape and paper so the labels are flexible and do not get in the way of the child’s fingers. To prepare all my colours (about three times the number you see in Figure 4.15) it took me two hours.

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Figure 4.15: Labelled colours.

The children like to go and have a look at the labels now and again. They also led to an impromptu game one day, invented by one of my students. She would pick a colour and not let me see the label and I had to ‘guess’ what it was. Then we would swap roles. On another day, one of my more advanced seven-year-olds asked me: Student: Is this crayon salmon? Teacher: What does it say? Student: Salmon. Teacher: Then yes. I smiled. She continued to look at me for a second or two, then returned to colouring. The important thing here, however, was not so much our exchange but the fact that labelling the colours had enriched her immediate linguistic environment and that she was noticing that extra information.

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Planning the language As much as we are teachers of language, we are also creatures of habit, movement and action. This carries over to when we plan our lessons. We tend to plan what we are going to do. If you have a look at the traditional lesson plan below, you will see it centres on activity. 1. Practise ordinal numbers in the queue at the door. 2. Ask students if they have been to the toilet. 3. Ask about the month at the door. 4. Students ask if they can come in. 5. Students ask each other if they have brought materials. 6. Appoint monitor. 7. Picture dictation with students writing on mini-boards. 8. Guessing-the-person-on-the-page game. 9. Guess-who’s-got-the-orange game. 10. Page 42/43 + DVD story. 11. Take in homework. This is also because our overriding concern is often how we are going to manage our groups. An equally valid plan however (previously suggested in Roland, 2014) would be the one below: 1. I’m first/second/third ... 2. I’ve been to the toilet/I haven’t been to the toilet. 3. It’s May. 4. Can I come in, please? 5. Have you got a pencil/pen/rubber/sharpener? Yes, I have. Good! No, I haven’t. 6. Who’s the monitor today? Is it ...? Yes, it is/No, it isn’t. 7. Can I have a board pen, please? Here you are. Thank you. You’re welcome. 8. [Are you ready?] Yes, I am. Wait!

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9. Teacher, what’s number 1/2/3/4/5/6? 10. Is it a boy/girl? 11. Has he/she got curly hair/fair hair/glasses/short hair? 12. _____ , have you got the orange? Yes, I have. No, I haven’t. 13. I’ve done my homework. I haven’t done my homework. (... sorry. Next time) 14. Here you are. Thank you. You’re welcome. You will notice here that what is going to happen is recorded in terms of the actual language students will be saying. The language is the plan. This helps the teacher see how much language learning and practice will be going on and reframes the class as a series of linguistic events, which we will explore more thoroughly in the next chapter. 

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So, to sum up, think about the following points and try to incorporate them into your future classes: provide as many opportunities as possible for learners to hear and see (and say and write) the target language; vary the way that this language reaches them so that the repetition is not as obvious and even becomes fun; allow learners to compare the language they produce with your model; and finally, with classroom language, sentences, songs, and the classic Wh- questions, ask yourself, regularly: Do they actually know what they are saying?

Questions for reflection ■■ This chapter discusses the value of sitting watching your students read. Do

you agree with the points raised? Do you ever get a chance to do this? ■■ Could you purposefully increase your students’ exposure to core language, as described in the chapter? ■■ How do you feel about the idea of writing a lesson plan like the one above, which focuses on the language students will be producing at any given stage of a lesson, rather than the actions they will be performing?

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Things to try 1. Look at the coursebook you are using. Can you spot where the authors have tried to deliberately increase the number of times students see or hear the core target language there? Are you complementing your coursebook by including this element of repetition? 2. Monitor your students when it comes to the language of classroom routines, chants and songs. Are you sure they know what they are saying? Do they know where the individual words start and end? Do they know what those words mean? 3. Explore one or two of the numerous techniques and activities in the chapter for helping students map sound to written form. Decide how effectively they would work for your particular classes and make notes on what you would tweak for next time.

Further reading Butzkamm WW & Caldwell JAW (2009) The Bilingual Reform. Tübingen: Narr Verlag. Bykova A & Roland C (2019) How much is enough? Immersion teaching for very young learners – a case study. English Teaching Professional. Hove: Pavilion Publishing and Media pp20–22. Corbett J & O’Farrell R (2013) English Quest 3. London: Macmillan. Kerr P (2016) The learner’s own language. ExELL (Explorations in English Language and Linguistics) 3 (1) 1–7. Montessori M (1965) Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook. New York: Schocken Books. Roland C (2008) Iatefl Voices. Talkback. Issue July–August 203, p9. Schickedanz JA & Collins M (2013) So Much More Than the ABC’s. Washington DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children. Roland C (2010) A grain of sand and a smattering of colour. Appinep: Celebrating Ten Years of Teaching Children in Portugal. Edited by Sandie Mourão. Lisbon: APPI. Roland C (2016) A question about little ones and language. APPInep E-Newsletter no. 4.

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Chapter 5: Language content 2 – Scripting events Linking language to classroom events In the previous chapter, we explored ideas for helping our learners decode language. Words and sentences in English were considered as something ‘out there’ in the world, something separate from us that can be looked at, studied, understood and learnt. In reality though, language is normally very tightly bound to action. In the classroom, we are not limited to simply looking at words from a distance either. The lesson – the coming together of lots of little people and a teacher – is an event in itself. This event has to be managed, of course, and that is where much of our energy goes as teachers of young learners, but the event can also provide myriad opportunities to link language to what is going on. The lesson as one big event consists of many smaller events, hundreds of them, some instigated by the teacher (children lining up, repeating something, playing a game or doing a role play) and some of them not (requests for help or for the toilet, children telling you about their day, small squabbles, various accidents). Whether planned or spontaneous, all of these occurrences can be linked to language. This is where an element of mastery starts to creep into what teachers do on a daily basis. This mastery lies somewhere between art and science, and it consists of levels of technique that we can consciously practise and acquire.

What is a script? I am going to borrow two terms from Jerome Bruner’s book Child’s Talk (1983). The first is that of scripts. In his breakdown of child–parent

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interaction, Bruner introduces scripts as the language that accompanies and signifies the stages and turns in a game. His example activity is a pop-up clown puppet on a stick disappearing into and reappearing from a cone. A typical script might be: ‘Gone! He’s gone!’ or ‘There he is!’ For our ELT context, I use a reformulated definition. A script is a sentencelength utterance tied to a classroom event that is repeated over time so that children can learn it. Popular comedy sketch series and gameshows often use a similar device – repeating catchphrases and punchlines that the viewer starts to associate with certain situations or characters. You may also recognise these more formal scripts: ‘You have the right to remain silent. Anything you do say can be used…’ ‘Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and…’ ‘…from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish…’ The Miranda warning, the oath for sworn testimony and Christian wedding vows are scripts that many of us have internalised over time. When you use scripts in class, you need to exercise a certain amount of flexibility to avoid over-ritualising your lessons. You also need to be careful with novelty, so as not to turn those lessons into a comedy circus. Some teacher trainers talk about the importance of routines in class. I have some reservations about this. We often conceive of routines in terms of the student and teacher activity they involve. When we think about activity, we start to forget about language, and those routines can become both predictable and unproductive for our learners. That is why I prefer to think in terms of classroom events and their accompanying scripts. With lower-primary students, aged four to eight, my scripts tend to be set pieces, as described throughout this chapter. With upper-primary students you can move to more improvised exchanges centred on a theme. For an example of this type of exchange, see the Have you + [present perfect] questions in the ‘Case study’ on pages 107-108, where the teacher is checking that students have performed their assigned tasks. For now, we will look at some other ways to link language to events.

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Create complex exchanges at the door Most teachers start their young learner lessons with some sort of sequence at the door of the classroom – at least some of the time. In the sequence suggested here, students are lined up outside and the language they practise is: Hello, teacher. It’s [+ the time]. I’m waiting properly. I’m waiting quietly. I’ve been to the toilet. Can I come in, please? Again, you will notice this is all from the first person. I do also teach the word properly, even to my younger learners, as it quite nicely transfers to ‘I’m sitting properly’ once we are inside the class. I include the present perfect in the penultimate sentence above. I introduce these scripts, one or two at a time, over the first month or so of classes. Just as the children are getting used to what is there, a little more language is introduced. I also recommend putting each sentence on a card with an image that helps convey the meaning or, as I have been doing in recent years, a photograph of the teacher miming the script (as in Figures 5.1 and 5.2). These cards can be displayed on the outside of the classroom door. Not only does this provide a visual prompt for the teacher to point to, it also means that the language is always there for the students to see – even when the teacher is not. This is an example of how the teacher can use their own persona to draw students’ attention towards a particular facet of language or language item. At first, the teacher models the sentences. Then, as the children get used to the scripts, the teacher withdraws the model and prompts by pointing to each picture.

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Figures 5.1 and 5.2: These pictures and their accompanying language appear one by one on the outside of the classroom door during the first two months of the year.

Up to now, this is a relatively straightforward at-the-door sequence, but here, I think, is where things get more interesting. Once the children are familiar with their scripts, having repeated them after the teacher over various weeks, you can then start to introduce the teacher’s scripts, as cues. These questions are printed out onto strips of paper and stuck onto the pictures, as in Figures 5.3 and 5.4, only once the students are already familiar with the original text.

Figures 5.3 and 5.4: These additional teacher prompts go up much later. The children carry on saying what they have always said.

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I tell them: ‘I am going to say this bit on the white strip, you say your part as normal’. The teacher then reads the new strip of language, for example: ‘How are you waiting?’ And the children respond with the same utterance they have been repeating all along: ‘I’m waiting properly.’ The only thing that has changed is the nature of the teacher’s prompt. Instead of modelling or pointing, we are now prompting with a question, that is, with language that is different from the language the students are repeating. The change is subtle but the effects are massive. It means that you, the teacher, can say your part as quickly as you want to, using real-time speech and the children will be able to keep up, turning what previously looked like simple drilling into a polished (though still drilled) dialogue.

Figure 5.5: Full at-the-door sequence and prompts.

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Returning to Child’s Talk, Bruner uses the term ‘scaffolding’ to describe how an adult might talk to a baby as if it understands, leaving slots open for the baby to insert its babbling and responding to that as if it were meaningful, hence demonstrating to the youngster how conversation works: ‘Are you hungry?’ ‘Ga-ga-ga.’ ‘Oh, yes you are!’ This term has been generalised somewhat by the teaching profession to denote any kind of verbal assistance provided by the teacher. What we have in our at-the-door sequence now is in fact a kind of reverse scaffolding where we have taught the students their parts first and then added in our own adult cues. It means that what is, in fact, a gradually constructed and wellprepared sequence ends up resembling a relatively spontaneous and highlevel exchange, which tends to impress those who see it – such as parents, colleagues or other groups of students.

Turn coats and jackets into practice Once inside the class, you will want to get your children settled quickly. My students pass me their coats and say: Student: Here’s my coat [or jacket]. Teacher: Thank you. Taking in the coats, when there are few enough students to make this doable, allows the teacher to hold them up one by one at the end of the lesson and ask: ‘Whose is this?’ …to which the coat’s owner can reply: ‘It’s mine.’ This exchange is further applicable to other settings such as: Teacher: Whose book/pencil case/worksheet/rubber is this? Student: It’s mine. When deciding on what language we are going to tie to events in the classroom, it is this characteristic of transferability that can guide us. If, with relatively little modification, the script can be applied to another setting, then it is going to be especially useful to our students. If you have a larger class

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with coat hooks and the children hanging up their own items of clothing, the teacher can still pick three or four coats randomly at the end and ask whose they are.

Get the class settled quickly My next instruction is usually, ‘I’m sitting in my chair!’ Some teachers like to routinise the first 20 minutes of class or even the whole lesson, transitioning from one familiar chant, song or game to another. My own classes are a little less predictable these days, which makes the importance of being able to reset effectively with the script opposite all the greater. From here we might transition to circle time: ‘I’m sitting in a circle.’. Again, I choose to use statements from the individual child’s perspective in the first person present continuous here rather than ‘I want you to …’ or ‘We’re going to …’. Teacher instruction and student reaction follow seamlessly on from one another. As soon as the teacher states what the class is doing, the most responsive children will start doing it. By stating your directions for the class as matter of fact, you can shortcut any unnecessary debate and reduce transition time. You can also use the behaviour of those responsive students as a model by praising one or two of them briefly so the rest follow suit. Next, you might want to present from the board. Before that, you can establish who is going to help the teacher out today.

Decide who will be the teacher’s helper There are various way to keep track of whose turn is next. You can make a mark on the register or you can have something slightly more visual like my wheel of fortune in Figure 5.6. There is a brass splitter pin in the centre so the plate rotates. All the students are represented on the wheel, which the teacher turns by one increment each lesson. Whichever student is at the top, aligned with the arrow (made from cutting a triangular piece of card) above the wheel, will be the monitor for the day. The wheel is simply a visual reminder. I used to use photographs of the children from our database. These days I use face templates which the children can decorate themselves, choosing long or short hair, for example,

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and colouring their avatar’s hair and eyes so it has a likeness to themselves, or not, as they wish. In Downloadable resource 5 you will find a template for creating these.

Figure 5.6: By turning this wheel clockwise by one student per lesson, you can easily see who the teacher’s helper is going to be.

I like to move to a central position and prompt the students as follows: Teacher: Who’s… [with a rising intonation to create a little excitement] Student: …the monitor today? Teacher: The monitor is… Helen! By the end of the first term, students only need to see my rounded lips about to make the ‘Wh-’ sound and they can complete the sequence themselves. Several times over the years, when I have been late putting a wheel of fortune up, I have noticed that they very quickly manage to learn the order of their names on the register by heart. The teacher then passes the monitor’s lanyard to last lesson’s monitor, who takes it over to this lesson’s one, saying: ‘Here you are’.

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Teaching conferences often give attendees lanyards to wear around their necks with their name and affiliation on them. If you find yourself arriving home with one of these, it can be recycled as a monitor/teacher’s helper lanyard in class.

Figure 5.7: A class monitor’s lanyard.

Case study: Assigning roles At the British Council in Barcelona, with his upper-primary groups who generally enter the classroom before him, Neeraj Dhanani likes to give each student a role for the beginning of the lesson. So by the time he walks in, the start-of-class board wiper has already cleaned the board, the date writer has already put the date at the top, the questions writer has already written any initial queries the class might have for the teacher. The equipment switch on-er has the classroom computer and projector booted up, the chair-andtables monitor has made sure the room has been reset, the pencil monitor has made sure everyone has something to write with by negotiating any necessary loans between students, and the register monitor has checked that everyone is present. At the end of the lesson, the end-of-class board wiper does their part as does the waste-paper-recycling monitor and the student who is responsible for collecting in homework. Neeraj will create new roles or merge existing ones to make sure that all students have something to do. If you have a larger class, such as 30 students, the ten roles described above could be assigned to a third of the class for two weeks, then to another third, then to the last third. continued 

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At upper-primary level, the associated language that can accompany this is almost limitless: Teacher: Student: Teacher: Student: Teacher: Student: Teacher: Student: Teacher: Student 2: Teacher:

Who’s questions monitor today? Er… I am teacher. Have you checked if anyone has any questions yet? I don’t see anything up there. Sorry teacher, I… …forgot? Yes. Do you want to check now then? Okay. And who’s the pencil and pen monitor? Me, teacher. Have you checked that Juan has something to write with? He looks a little empty-handed there.

In Chapter 3, I fielded the notion that ideas always come from somewhere. When I told Neeraj how much I liked his system, he quite humbly told me: ‘It’s just what my teachers used to do with us when we were at school, to teach us responsibility – and I think it worked for us.’

Evolving scripts One thing that can make your young learner classes look as if they are not going anywhere, especially in comparison to teenage or adult English teaching, is if you allow your routines to stagnate. If you are still using the same circle song (containing, for example, the language: Hello, how are you? I’m fine, thanks) with your five-year-olds in June that you introduced in September, then you might not be maximising opportunities. Your students probably assimilated the language in a month or two. In the remaining months, you could have been adding to the language, making it part of a fuller, more meaningful sequence. Language in the classroom is like any living thing on this planet. If it stops moving for long enough, it dies.

An evolving role play This same principle can be applied to more advanced interactions. I shall now describe a scripted roleplay that we repeated various times with the dialogue itself developing with each repetition.

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We worked through the script below, practising pronunciation and making sure we all knew what everything meant. You will see that the patient’s and the doctor’s lines are clearly divided. To help further, I put an image of an X-ray of a broken finger on one side of the handout and a doctor in a white coat on the other.

Patient

Doctor

Doctor! Can you help me! Yes I can. I’ve broken my finger! Can I see? Yes, doctor. That’s better! Thank you, doctor. You’re welcome! Goodbye. Goodbye! The students sat in two rows opposite each other and acted out the drama, with the doctor bandaging the patient’s hand with toilet roll and a small plaster at the moment in the dialogue just before they say, ‘That’s better!’ One little boy did not want a plaster on his finger, so his partner bandaged a pink crayon which served as his proxy finger. Two weeks later, we role-played the same situation, but this time the patient’s line ran: ‘I’ve broken my hand’. Another little boy brought in a picture of a skeleton that he had labelled. He even had ‘femur’ and ‘pelvis’ on there. So, the final time we role-played the situation, we had the patient with broken ribs.

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Figure 5.8: A doctor busy at work bandaging her partner’s ribs.

While the toilet paper was just a bit of fun, the dialogue was loaded with useful language for these seven- and eight-year-olds, including the present perfect ‘I’ve broken…’. While the spaced repetition over several months helped them learn the language that did not change, we were also working our way through the lexical set of human anatomy, so the roleplay was not standing still.

A mail board This consists of one envelope for each child, with their name on it, taped onto a large sheet of card. Over the years I have used envelopes of varying sizes, ranging from mini to full-sized A4. It is worthwhile thinking about what you are going to be ‘posting’ to your students and choosing a size that works best.

Figure 5.9: A mail board

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You can use the mail board to deliver handouts, worksheets, letters and other materials. The mail board itself is basically a distribution system to which you can attach a script. Stand by the mail board and say: ‘__________ [name of student on first envelope]: there’s a letter for you.’ That student says: ‘I’ll come and get it.’ The child collects their letter and then stands next to the mail board and calls the second student. ‘__________ [name of student on second envelope]: there’s a letter for you.’ The first student then returns to their place and the second student comes to collect their letter, calling the third. You can stand back and let the sequence work by itself. This is a simple device, but seeing it in operation with the accompanying language is indeed a rewarding experience.

Incorporating the water cycle The water cycle I want to talk about here (first mentioned in Roland, 2018) goes like this: first our young learners are thirsty and ask to drink water. Then they are okay for a while. After a little while longer they need the toilet and then the whole cycle starts again.

Make time for drinking I have worked in large primary classrooms where there was a tap and basin for washing hands and drinking. These days, my classes are somewhat smaller and I find that I lose my students to drinking water, especially in the summer months, with a steady trickle of thirsty students requesting a drink. About three years ago I found a way to reclaim these moments and to turn them into teaching. The request, ‘Can I get some water?’ is fine, but if we can go beyond that, then all the better. I started by using a traditional Spanish clay water jug, known here as a ‘botijo’ or ‘buccaro’.

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Figure 5.10: The brown clay water jug

Rather than responding to individual requests, I made water drinking a set stage in the lesson, with everyone lining up together, each student having their own labelled cup and asking: ‘Can I drink from the brown clay water jug, please?’ To begin with I thought the children might have problems with the length of the request, but they got that very quickly.

Take things further Ana Demitroff, one of my favourite presenters on young learner methodology, always reminds teachers to exploit the physicality of objects. After one of her sessions, I asked the class at the start of a lesson to predict whether the jug was in fact full or not, using the language, ‘I think it’s full’ or ‘I think it’s empty’. This was facilitated by the fact that occasionally I would forget to fill the jug up. To aid them in their prediction, I allowed each child to knock on the jug a few times.

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Figure 5.11: Is it full or is it empty? The students get to knock but not hold the jug.

For the second term, I picked up another vessel and the children were able to choose between the brown and the yellow clay water jug.

Figure 5.12: Having a choice of water jugs makes a lot of difference.

This went down so well that the subsequent year I started with the set-up on page 114. We had four jugs and the corresponding scripts written near to them.

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Figures 5.13 and 5.14: Adjectives of colour, materials and purpose shown in their corresponding order.

Of course, the most popular jug is nearly always the ‘baby jug’.

Figure 5.15: Various jugs give children a chance to choose.

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Not all teachers live in places where clay water jugs are readily available, but this is not really about the water jugs themselves. It is about the scripts. Three or four coloured bottles would work well to teach: ‘Can I drink from the green glass bottle?’ and so on. If you have clear bottles or jugs, core vocabulary could be taped to the outside of each container resulting in the something like: ‘Can I drink from the bottle with the word [or picture of the] sea/forest/beach on it, please?’ Occasionally there will be spillages, especially when pouring from an exaggerated height, as I can be seen doing in Figure 5.12. One day, Nacho dropped his cup. We had just done full/empty predictions with the jug, so I asked him: ‘Nacho, is it full or is it empty?’ He grinned apologetically: ‘It’s empty.’ The language from our previously manufactured event (the predicting) suddenly became spontaneous and real. That satisfaction far outweighed any inconvenience, but I did not tell that to the class because I did not need any subsequent ‘accidental’ spillages.

Make room for the second part of the cycle The water-drinking routine harnesses the children’s enthusiasm for something in order to practise a number of scripts. With requests to go to the toilet, we need to be a little bit more careful. Little children sometimes realise they need to go to the toilet with very little warning or suddenly realise they have been ‘holding it’ too long. If we insist that they produce too much language before they get to go, we could create discomfort and possible accidents. The problem is, once they have gone, any elaborations on: Can I go to the toilet, please? will seem redundant. As a solution, I have introduced the idea of a password that students need to write once they come back to the room, in order to rejoin the class. ‘Can I go to the toilet, teacher?’ ‘Yes, but when you come back, the password is “… use a computer”.’ Here, as a ‘password’, I am picking a word or phrase that we are currently studying and that I think that the particular student asking needs practice on.

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When that student comes back, in order to rejoin the class, they write the password onto the erasable section of our toilet poster as seen below.

Figure 5.16: The ‘bowl’ of the toilet is covered with laminating film so that it can be written on and wiped clean.

The drawing itself is very basic and in the future I plan to produce a more refined version. However, by anchoring language to the child’s desire to reincorporate themselves into whatever classroom activity is in progress on their return, we have made another small space for some writing practice. In the picture here, we can still see various spelling errors so even this small lesson add-on is providing the teacher with valuable information.

Knowing where to place the language Let us pause for a second to look at a small but very important detail. Imagine, in a busy lesson, as you are tending to one child’s query and have just noticed another needing help, that a third is suddenly at your side asking for a pencil. You quickly pass them one from your table but then, as they are walking away, your mental processing catches up with reality

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and you realise they just asked for it in their first language. ‘Can I have a pencil please?’ you call out to the disappearing child who may or may not echo your words. We can represent what has happened by the following schema. The student [S] has approached the teacher [T]. They have got the pencil they wanted, represented by the bar and superscript Tr (for transaction). Then the teacher has tried to peg some language on to the end of all this. T