'English is fun!' Challenges and opportunities

1. English at School     11

Teaching English to young learners     12

The Young Learner     15

What do we know about child learners?     15

What is the role of the pupils’ first language in the language classroom?     16

How can we help all our pupils to learn English?     20

What are the influences on second language development in the young learner classroom?     23

What can we say about the teacher, materials, and methods?     25

What is so special about school years 4 to 6?     27

The national curriculum, Lgr11     30

2. Structuring a Lesson     33

What are the different parts of a lesson?     33

What is the role of warm ups?     35

Warm Up 1: Alphabetical Order     36

Warm up 2: 10 Questions     39

Warm up 3: Flags     41

How can the teacher use English to create ‘space for learning’?     45

Language as a tool     49

3. Speaking and Listening     53

Creating a meaningful context     54

Task 1: The Oscars     55

Task 2: The Kingdom of Water     63

Order of presentation     69

Focus on pronunciation     70

Exercise 1: Minimal Pairs     73

Exercise 2: Four Corners     74

Exercise 3: Mark the Stress     74

Exercise 4: The Odd-One-Out     75

Exercise 5: The Phonetic Walk     76

4. Working with the information gap     77

Creating a need to use the language     78

Information Gap 1: One describes, one draws     81

Information Gap 2: Halves of a crossword     85

Information Gap 3: Jigsaw     88

A multimodal approach to jigsaw     91

Information Gap 4: The Blurb     93

5. Reading and Writing     99

Developing reading strategies     100

Using texts in the course book     106

Shorter texts     106

Longer texts     109

Writing: controlled, guided, free     110

The Titanic     111

A Day at the Beach     115

Some final thoughts     119

6. Grammar and Vocabulary     121

Focus on meaning, focus on form     121

Grammar teaching and young learners     122

Grammar teaching and Lgr11     125

Ways of teaching grammar     125

Grammar in context     129

Words as a stepping stone to grammar     135

7. A Communicative Perspective on Teaching English     145

Revisiting Behaviourism     146

Developing communicative competence     151

Communicative teaching approaches     153

Theories of second language learning     155

The Art Gallery     158

8. Assessing language development     169

Characteristics of a good task     169

The painting: assessment for learning in the spoken language     172

The painting: assessment for learning in the written language     180

9. Planning lessons based on a textbook     187

Working towards an all-round communicative competence     188

Lesson one     189

Lesson two     193

Lesson three     194

Lesson four     197

Discussion of our lesson planning     201

Scaffolding     202

Translanguaging     203

Challenging everyone     205

Products for assessment     206

10. Creating a Storyline     211

The Storyline Approach     212

Our Street: A story about neighbours     213

Key Question 1: Who are you?     214

Key Question 2: Where do you live?     217

Key Question 3: Who are our new neighbours?     218

Key Question 4: What can we do to help our new neighbours?     221

Connecting practice to theory     224

Conclusion     231

References   235