Teaching "chunks" to Very Young Learners

For those of us who teach very young children, who are still at the nursery or reception class stage (in Spain until 6 years), it can be very frustrating to see that after all our efforts, the children only remember a few individual words. I have been teaching at a nusery school twice a week for many years, I only see them for half an hour at a time, and only a few of those children actually go home at the end of the year with more than a few words learnt. This is due to the extremely little exposure they get to English, an hour a week is not enough, they would ideally need to be practising and reviewing the new vocabulary throughout the rest of the week in order for me to teach them something new each lesson. As this is not the case, since English is just an "extra" and not actually part of the syllabus, it is disappointing, especially for the parents who think that their child is going to come out speaking English, that they cannot remember the color orange when they go home after 6 months of English lessons.

However, if you have more contact with the children, you can get much better results by teaching "chunks". By chunks, I mean expressions or short sentences, instead of individual words. I have a class of five-year-olds in my language school, whom I see for two hours a week, and recently we have been learning to use can for ability. Children of this age evidently have no understanding of grammatical concepts, but you can ask them in L1 if they can do certain things, like swim or skate, and then go on to teach the English way of saying it. You can also teach through mime. Children love it when the teacher acts a bit silly, I have had many laughs when pretending to ride a bike and then falling off to elicit "I can't ride a bike"  and this helps them to remember. The important thing is to teach them "I can ride a bike", instead of just ride, or bike. I actually taught the vocabulary first, and later added "I can" and "I can't". In our course book, the current unit includes the vocabulary: skip, slide, ride a bike, fly, play football, swim and dive. There are flashcards with the characters doing these activities, so in the second lesson, I used "Anna can skip", "Lee can play football" etc. Some of the brighter children started to use these chunks even in that very lesson! In a subsequent lesson, I introduced: "I can swim. Can you swim?" and encouraged them to reply "Yes, I can" or No, I can't". We had already practised hearing the difference between can and can't in one of the previous lessons.

What I would like to point out with these examples is that it is much more rewarding for the child and the teacher if the child has learnt a "chunk" of language, rather than just an individual word. I encourage the children by telling them that they can now say complete sentences in English! The child feels that they have learnt something important, and the teacher sees that the child is using real English, they are actually communicating, not just looking at a flashcard and saying what they see. I think this is especially important for 5 and 6 year olds because they are competent in their own language and if they can communicate in another language, they feel (and rightly so) proud of themselves, and want to learn more. It is much more motivating to learn how to really communicate something in another language, than just to learn individual words. I still remember quite a few words in German from school, but I cannot say a single sentence, and I therefore feel that I know no German. Our learners must feel the same, whatever their age.

Every year, at the beginning of term, I teach the chunks: Can I have a pencil/rubber/ruler/sharpener, please? along with Can I go to the toilet, please? as I feel it is much more positive for the children to ask for things properly, instead of saying "rubber please", and they do actually learn to do so. It is important to start these habits early on, and not let them off because they are so young. The more you can get a child to communicate, the better!

Nice Classroom Routines for (very) Young Learners

I have set up two activities to use as routines with a couple of my young learner groups. Any kind of routine at the beginning of the lesson is a good idea with small children, up to about 6 years old, as they know what to expect and therefore feel more comfortable. This is especially important if it is the first time they have been in a language learning situation.

The first is a colour table. The coursebook the children will be using has a colour scheme - each unit is a different colour and the book's mascot turns that same colour. I decided to set up a colour table following the scheme of the book. The first unit is red and I have made the table out of an old cardboard box and a piece of red fabric. After discussing red items with the children, they started to bring in red objects to put on the table. This can produce some unusual vocabulary depending on the items they bring in, but they are usually engaged at this stage and are keen to know the names of their objects in English. When we progress to unit 2 the table will change colour.

The other routine, which I am using with two classes on alternate days, is a calendar. I bought the calendar set from www.latiendadelprofesor.com. It consists of a large sun with the days of the week and a space for each date. The dates come on small cards to stick in the right place. Each lesson the children tell me what the date is and one of them sticks the number on the calendar. The name of the month comes on a nice cloud which is placed next to the sun. There are also cards for "Today is..." and "The weather is...". These make a nice activity for the beginning of each lesson, revising days of the week, numbers up to 31, months of the year and weather. There are also special cards for festivals and birthdays - making it easier to remember all the children's birthdays!

Classroom Management with YLs

On the first day with my new group of 4-5 year-olds I had a bit of a nightmare with two children. This is their second year in the English academy, whereas all the other children are here for the first time, and I think that partly because they had 7 new classmates, and because they did not know me, they started to play up and "test" me to see what they could get away with. One of the two boys would not sit on his chair for more than about two minutes before he would get up and move to another part of the classroom, or start swinging on his chair. Him and his friend were also quite silly and began shouting and making noises, which, when I asked them if that was correct behaviour for a classroom, they replied "yes". I did have a word with one of them and mentioned speaking to their mothers, as that was no way to behave, especially on their first day, but this didn't really trouble them for more than a few minutes.

So, it was obvious that I had to try something different. Yesterday, I had the same class for their second lesson and we spent a good part of it discuccing appropriate behaviour and I also introduced them to a reward scheme.

We played a game which helped us discuss good and bad behaviour, where I would give an instruction to a child e.g stand on your chair, and the others would have to decide whether this was appropriate classroom behaviour. They either put their thumbs up and said "OK" or they wagged their finger and said "Don't do that!". We had great fun and managed to agree on what behaviour was and wasn't acceptable.

Small children love the idea of getting stickers or stars and it usually motivates them to behave better. So, we now have a reward scheme: a chart with everyone's name on it and plenty of space to stick gold stars. After explaining the system and writing their names, the children helped me to decorate the edges with drawings. I have told them that they can get stars for good behaviour, or if they do their work really well, or try very hard, or help their classmates. The "naughty" boy from the first day informed me that he would be behaving very well and that he was going to get lots of stars. We shall see...

Another idea which will hopefully complement the star system is that of having a class helper. Each day, one of the children will be responsible for helping me to hand out and collect books and worksheets, crayons etc. I have cut out a small smiley face which I stick next to the name of that day's helper on the star chart. Yesterday I made one of the two problematic boys helper, and he seemed to enjoy that responsibility and was very good. His friend kept asking me if he would be the helper the following day.

So, even if I can't keep their "bottoms on seats" I do think that this system will make life a bit easier for me and enjoyable for them

Note: I have used similar schemes before, with slighlty older children. Last year I tried to get the children to cooperate more with each other by dividing them into teams, giving it a competitive aspect. The team with the most stars at the end of term got a prize. With this I hoped that peer pressure would encourage the naughtier children to behave better. It didn't go quite as well as I had hoped, since some of the children often complained that they didn't want to be in "so-and-so's team" because he never got any stars. For this year I have decided to make it individual.