The use of communicative approaches in teaching English in elementary school
Міністерство
освіти і науки України
Львівський
національний університет ім. І.Франка
КУРСОВА РОБОТА
на
тему:
“Застосування
комунікативних підходів у навчанні англійської мови у початковій школі”
Tell me and I forget, show me andremember, involve me and
I’ll learn.
main purpose of learning a foreign language is to enable our
students to communicate in it. This is the process of arriving at the point of
understanding a language, and this is where the communicative approach to language
teaching and learning comes to the forefront. In recent years the communicative
approach has become ever more popular and overall effective ways to facilitate
second language learning.
Communicative Approach
origins of Communicative Language Teaching are to be found in
the changes in the British language teaching tradition dating from the late
1960s. The writings of D. Wilkins, H. Widdowson, C. Candlin, C. Brumfit, K.
Johnson and other British applied linguists on the theoretical basics for a
communicative or functional approach to language teaching; the rapid
application of these ideas by textbook writers; the equally rapid acceptance of
these new principles by British Language teaching specialists, curriculum
development centers, and even governments gave prominence nationally and
internationally to what came to be referred to as the Communicative
Approach.essential characteristics of the approach are:
1. Most of the class time is pent on speaking
activities. If the teacher presents a text orally or tells his learners to read
it, this receptive task is usually used only as a preparation for immediately
introducing a speaking activity related to the text.
2. Only the target language is used in class.
. Most of the speaking activities practiced in class
involve spontaneous exchange in unplanned discourse.
. The focus of all classroom is on exchange of
information and not on the language and its forms. Learners’ incorrect
utterances are also accepted by the teacher as long as it is relatively clear
what they mean.
. There are no grammar explanations and exercises, no
drills of any kind, no grammar tests. Grammar is supposed to be acquired in a
non-deliberative way, as a by-product of participation in various communicative
activities in class. Only when there is a complete block of communication
caused by the wrong use of a language form, can the form itself become an
object of the learners’ conscious attention and the teacher may try to explain
in some way the meaning of this form.
. Learners’ errors, particularly grammatical ones, are
not corrected by the teacher in any direct way. They are either completely
ignored or corrected in an oblique manner.
. The teacher is not the central figure in he
classroom and the only provider of feedback. Classroom activities are often
carried in small groups or pair, with the teacher walking around, listening in
and providing help when necessary.to the New Conception of Education the main
aim of teaching foreign language is forming in learners’ communicative
competence, which means mastering language as intercultural communicative
means, developing skills of using foreign language as a tool in cooperation of
cultures of modern world. with young language learners in the primary classroom
can be both a rewarding and a demanding experience. To make the most of that
experience for both learners and teachers we need to be very clear what is we
are trying to do. We must try to identify what learning language in school
demands from young children and what it can offer them. We should also
acknowledge what the implications of those demands and needs are for the
teachers.children do not come to the language classroom empty-handed. They
bring with them an already well-established set of instincts, skills and
characteristics which will help them to learn another language. We need to
identify those and make the most of them. For example, children:
- are already very good at interpreting meaning without
necessarily understanding the individual words;
- already have great skill in using limited language
creatively;
frequently learn indirectly rather than directly;
take great pleasure in finding and creating fun in
what they do;
have a ready imagination;
above all take great delight in talking!
’s ability to grasp meaning
young children are able to understand what is being said to
them even before they understand the individual words. Intonation, gesture,
facial expressions, actions and circumstances all help to tell them the unknown
words and phrases probably mean. By understanding the message in this way they
start to understand the language. In later life we all maintain this first
source of understanding alongside our knowledge of the language itself. It
remains a fundamental part of human communication.come to primary school with
this ability already highly developed. They continue to use it in all their
schoolwork. For example, even thought their mother tongue skills are already
well established, they may well find it difficult to follow purely verbal instructions
and information. When this happens, or sometimes simply out of laziness or
inattention, children will tend to rely on their ability to “read” the general
message. We can see this happening most clearly when they get it wrong. More
importantly, particularly in terms of language development, their
message-interpreting skill is part of the way they learn new words, concepts
and expressions in their mother tongue as their language expands to meet the
new challenges of school.when children encounter a new language at school, they
can on the same skill to help them interpret the new sounds, new words and new
structures. We want to support and develop these skills. We can do this by
making sure we make full use of gesture, intonation, demonstration, actions and
facial expressions to convey meaning parallel to what we are saying. We must
also try not to undermine the children’s willingness to use the skill.
’s creative use of limited language resources
the early stages of their mother tongue development children
excel at making a little language go a long way. They are creative with
grammatical forms. They are also creative with concepts. Children also create
words by analogy, or they even invent completely new words which then come into
the family vocabulary. This phenomenon is fundamental language development. In
order to make the most of the creative language skill the children bring with
them, we therefore have to provide them occasions when:
- the urge to communicate makes them find some way of
expressing themselves;
- the language demanded by the activity is
unpredictable and isn’t just asking the children to repeat set phrases, but it
encouraging them to construct language actively for themselves.is why games are
so useful and so important. It is not just because they are fun. It is partly
because the fun element creates a desire to communicate and partly because
games can create unpredictability.we acknowledge the need for unpredictability,
it follows that in addition to occasions when the children practice learnt
dialogue or other specific language items under close teacher guidance, there
will also need to be occasions when we set up an activity and then leave the
children to get on with it.
’s capacity for indirect learning
when teachers are controlling an activity fairly closely,
children sometimes seem to notice something out of the corner of their eye and
to remember it better than they were actually supposed to be learning. At times
this can be a frustrating experience for the teacher but this capacity too can
be turned to our advantage in the language classroom. It is part of the rather
complex phenomenon of indirect learning.activities which involve children in
guessing what phrase or word someone has thought of are very good examples of
this phenomenon in action. As far as the children are concerned, they are not
trying to learn phrases: they are concentrating on trying to guess right.
However, by the time they have finished the repeated guessing, they will have
confirmed words and structures they only half knew at the beginning. They will
have got the phrases firmly into their minds. They will probably even have
adjusted their pronunciation. Guessing is actually a very powerful way of
learning phrases and structures, but it is indirect because the mind is engaged
with the task and is not focusing on the language.primary school level the
children capacity for conscious leaning of forms and grammatical patterns is
still relatively undeveloped. In contrast, all children, whether they prefer to
‘sort things out’ or ‘muddle through’, bring with them an enormous instinct for
indirect learning. If we are to make the most of that asset we need to build on
it quite deliberately and very fully.
’s instinct for play and fun
have an enormous capacity for finding and making fun.
Sometimes, it has to be said, they choose the most inconvenient moments to
indulge it! They bring a spark of individuality and of drama to much that they
do. When engaged in guessing activities children nearly always inject their own
element of drama into their hiding of the prompt-cards and their reactions to
the guesses of their classmates. They shuffle their cards ostentatiously under
the table so that the others can’t see. They may utter an increasingly
triumphant or smug ‘No!’ as the others fail to guess. They stare hard at the
rest of the class, they frown or they glower. Here their personalities emerge,
woven into the language use. In this way, they make the language their own.
That is why it is such very powerful contribution to learning. Through their
sense of fun and play, the children are living the language for real. Yet again
we can see why games have such a central role to play. But the games are not
the only way in which individual personalities surface in the language classroom.
There is also the whole area of imaginative thinking.
role of imagination
delight in imagination and fantasy. It is more than simply a
matter of enjoyment. In the primary school, children are very busing making
sense of the world about them. They are identifying pattern and also deviation
from that pattern. Thy test out their versions of the world through fantasy and
confirm how the world actually is by imaging how it might be different. In the
language classroom this capacity for fantasy and imagination has a very
constructive part to play.teaching should be concerned with real life. But it
would be a great pity if we were so concerned to promote reality in the
classroom that we forgot that reality for the children includes imagination and
fantasy. The act of fantasizing, of imagining, is very much an authentic part
of being a child. If we accept the role of the imagination in children’s lives
we can see that it provides another very powerful stimulus for real language
use. We need to find ways of building on this factor in the language classroom
to. We want to stimulate the children’s creative imagination so that they want
to use the language to share their ideas.
instinct for interaction and talk
all the instincts and attributes that children bring to the
classroom this probably the most important for the language teacher. It is also
the most obvious, so there is no need to labour the point. This particular
capacity can surface unbidden and sometimes unwanted in all classrooms. Its
persistence and strength is very much to our advantage in the primary language
classroom. It is the one of the most powerful motivators for using the
language. Children need to talk. Without talking they cannot become good at
talking.
preparation in junior forms
preparing a lesson the teacher plans organization, pupils’
doing and saying, and teacher’s doing and saying.typical form of a lesson in
junior forms is a theatrical game. The theatrical game is characterized by a
wide usage of game elements, competition, concealed forms of control,
functional music, combination of collective pair and individual work. Muck
attention should be paid to involuntary memorizing. To involve all pupils in
work a teacher should compile a kind of scenario in which every pupil has his
role, while the teacher only stimulates and directs his pupils’ role-playing.
steps a lesson preparation
. Study the school syllabus (general requirements,
requirements for a certain class).
. Observe conditions in which teaching-learning
process is going to take place.
. Acquaint with additional materials available and
those necessary for successful work.
. Study a lesson plan available in Teacher’s Book and
correlate it with abilities of your pupils, your personal characteristics.
. Try to
create your own lesson plan that coordinates with your intentions:) Think
over practical, cultural, educational and bringing-up aims that have to be
realized in the lesson.) Choose linguistic materials, exercise suitable
for realizing the aims.) Think over activities which ‘stir’ (wake up,
stimulate) a class and which ‘settle’ them. ) Choose methods and techniques
aimed at better acquisition of material and realizing the objectives. If they
are chosen successfully, the pupils will see the results of work and it will be
easy for the teacher to make conclusions.) Arrange components of the
lesson logically in accordance with parts of a certain lesson type.) Think
over the hometask i.e. the time of its presentation, content, size. It is
better if it naturally emerges from the lesson procedure.
Principles of
Teaching and Learning English in the Primary School
1. Every lesson should begin with a greeting in a
foreign language and a talk. In the group of the complete beginners the teacher
conducts the conversation with pupils. Later when pupils have already had some
experience, a pupil on duty or any other pupil may conduct it. It is possible
to arrange the conversation in pairs. A foreign language should be used for all
classroom activities.
2. There should be a variety of activities in every
lesson.
. The lesson should be conducted at a high speed when
oral drill exercises are performed. Pupils may be seated while saying a word, a
phrase or a sentence.
. The lesson should provide time for the activity of
every pupil in the class. The teacher should talk as little as possible.
. The lesson should provide conditions for pupils to
learn. “Language is a skill, so it should be learnt, it cannot be taught,” - M.
West once said. Pupils should be taught to learn for themselves.
. The work done during the lesson should prepare
pupils for their independent work at home. At early stages it is advisable not
to assign as hometask exercises including language material that has not been
covered in class.
. The lesson should be equipped with teaching aids and
teaching materials, which create natural situations for developing pupils’
listening and speaking skills in a foreign language.
. Develop ways of checking whether the pupils understand
what they say may be linguistically correct.the primary stage first of all we
should distinguish lessons of introductory course (first term of the first year
of language learning). The peculiarity of introductory course is oral
conducting of lesson. Pupils speak and read letters of ABC. They neither read
words, sentences, nor write. Oral teaching demands inventiveness, quick
activity on the part of the teacher. It is time to involve pupils in the world
of English, to find a place for English in their hearts. Bright visualization
is obligatory. Games, poems small, dialogues role-play, chorus work should
prevail.
Advantages of the Oral Introductory Course
1. It allows children to get a clear idea of how the
language sounds from the very first steps.
2. It stimulates pupils’ interest as they deal with the
language in its communicative function. For children a language is first of all
speech. So they are instructed in comprehension of elementary commands,
requests, statements and questions on the hand, and in saying something in a
foreign language on the other hand. They may speak about themselves, friends,
objects and things around.
. Much attention is paid to the development of
pronunciation habits and skills both in articulation and intonation since pupils
are taught spoken language only.
. Pupils’ responses reflect the level of their
comprehension of information. If it is slow and inaccurate, they revise it.
. It provides activity in the lesson. Pupils must
listen to what the teacher and their classmates say. Their memory, thinking,
visual, auditory, and listening analyzers are at work.
. It gives plenty of time for hearing, repetition, and
reproduction.introductory course combined lessons prevail. Such speech
activities as reading and writing are involved. Pupils first listen to the
portion of learning material, then it in speaking; the previously learnt
material is used for reading and writing. Thus, pupils work over the material
twice: first in oral speech then in written speech.differ in many ways. They
are different in discipline, cultural background and interests. All the
teachers are acquainted with such phenomenon: the same children always finish
the task first and can get bored or disruptive. Or one half of the students
have fulfilled the task while the other part only just begun to do it. Most
weaker pupils are often bad listeners because it’s difficult for them to
understand the teacher. The bigger the class is, the more the problems are
compounded.may be one of the new places left where children can find quiet and
sustained application to a task in hand. How can we reconcile this need to give
the children periods of sustained calm and independent work with our declared
intention to promote interaction and communication? In other words, how can we
be sure that interaction and communication do not simply lead to unproductive
fragmentation and restlessness? This is particularly important when our classes
are large or our classroom very cramped.
‘stir’ factor and ‘settle’ one
language activities stir a class. In a positive sense ‘stir’
means that activities wake them up, stimulate them. In a negative sense, it may
be that the activity over-excite them or allow them to become unconstructively
restless. There are other activities, which have the opposite effect. They seem
to settle the children. To put it positively, that means they will calm a class
down. The negative side of this is to say that some activities will bore the
class into inertia.we know the effect of activities like this, we can plan lesson,
which neither stay stuck in dullness nor get out of hand in excitement. So it
is useful to make your own list from experience of your particular class or
classes. For example, most teachers find copying quietens children like magic.
So does colouring. Competitions, on the other hand make children excited and
noisy.way of looking at it is in terms of the different effects of different
language skills. Oral work always seems to stir. Listening usually settles. You
can equally well apply the same stir/settle distinction to any typical and
regular teaching. For example, you perhaps have a routine oral exchange of
several sentences with which you regularly begin a lesson. Ask yourself whether
it basically stir or settles. There may be occasions when it is not an
appropriate start.will help to think of any classroom event in this way. What
happens when you hand out books? If the answer in your experience is ‘stir’
then there will be occasions when you quite deliberately choose to delay the
event until you have settled the classroom down. In order to have the freedom
to adapt, we need to know the effect of what we do. So you count make up a
chart, which reflects your experience.
example:
Usually stirs
|
Usually settles
|
oral work
|
copying
|
competitions
|
colouring
|
lotto
|
listening (if
they have something to do)
|
tests (if not
too difficult)
|
songs
|
being read to
|
drama games
|
|
that the headings say ‘usually’. This is because as soon as
we start doing this, we find ourselves saying sometimes like, “Well oral work
does stir but, in a funny sort of way, chorus work seems to calm them down.” Or
“Pairwork makes them noisy so I suppose it’s a stirrer, but sometimes they get
so absorbed in what they are doing that they settle”. So we have to take into
consideration all these aspects, which help us to plan our lesson successfully.
The
role of the Teacher
teacher plays different parts in the course of teaching. The
teacher adopts a variety of roles according to the activity conducted in the
classroom.a manager the teacher gives instructions for pupils. As a model the
teacher asks pupils to repeat a sound, a sentence after her for pronunciation
practice. The teacher goes round listening to the groups, to pairs practicing
dialogues. Here she (he) is a monitor. She or he is a counselor when she
advises pupils how best to approach a task. The teacher explains new language
material and this is case she or he is an informant. The teacher provides
material and guidance to enable pupils to work on their own. So, here, she or
he is a facilitator.good teacher should be enthusiastic, creative, patient, and
understanding towards the many pupils he or she deals with. are some
activities, which may be included in the structure of the lessons in the
primary school.
1. Developing speaking skills:
a) Help Winnie the Pooh to guess what present is there in the
box?
(Forms of work: pairwork, group work, individual work).this
activity pupils practice vocabulary, grammar structure “Is there …?”, they may
suggest their own version. ) Help Winnie the Pooh. Say what he should take to
the school.
) Discussion. Look at the pictures and say what do you like
or dislike.
children language lesson preparation
may colour the pictures. ) Help Winnie the Pooh to
colour the picture.
activity may be
used for developing listening skills.
2. For practicing (ABC) letters a lot of activities may be
used:
a) letter recognition
the letter G to find its garage.
) Help the little butterfly to fly its flower.
3. For practicing letters and sounds such an activity mat be
proposed.
Show the mice the way tom their houses.
4. For developing listening skills and practicing colours
such a game may to be used.
Game “Cat Tom”.is “Cat Tom”.class in chorus asks him: “Cat
Tom! Cat Tom! What colour do you want?”says: “Mew-mew!” I want “red”. All the
pupils have to touch the red card (or pencil). Who is wrong will be out of the
game.
There are some ‘settle’ activities, which we may use in our
lesson
Find what
letters are hidden in the pictures
communicative approach has changed our stereotypes about
teaching-learning process. It accents children’s participation in the
classroom, where the teacher is not the central figure of the lesson. She or he
is only the provider of feedback. Most of classtime is spent on speaking
activities and only target language is used. Pupils a taught to communicate in
non-deliberate way, their errors are corrected in an oblique manner. We should
know our little learners, their abilities and their interests. The teacher
should know that little children do not come to the classroom empty-handed.
They bring with them an already well-established set of instincts, skills and
characteristics, which will help them to learn another language. They are
already very good at interpreting meaning without necessarily understanding the
individual words. Intonation, gesture, actions and circumstances all help to
tell them what unknown words probably mean. Children frequently learn
indirectly rather than directly. They have a ready imagination and take great
pleasure in finding and creating fun in what they do. And above all they take
great delight in talking. This knowledge will help us in our work. While
preparing a lesson in the primary school the teacher plans a kind of scenario
of the theatrical game, in which each pupil has his role. The teacher only
stimulates and directs his pupils’ role-playing. lesson should provide
conditions for pupils learn. “Language is a skill, so it should be learnt, it
cannot be taught”, M.West once Said. So, pupils should be taught to learn for
themselves. And our task is to make the process of learning interesting and
enjoyable.
Reference
1. Halliwell
Susan. Teaching English in the Primary Classroom/Longman 1998.
. Mark
Fletcher. Teaching Success The Brain-friendly Revolution in Action!/English
Experience 2000.
. Rob
Nolasco and Lois Arthur. Conversation. Resource Books For Teachers/Oxford
University Press 1987.
4. Юлія
Дацько, Тамара Бабенко. Методика навчання англійської мови/Цикл лекційю Львів
ЛДУ 1999.
5. Anna
Krystaniluk. Lesson Preparation in Junior Forms/”English” №40, October 2003, p. 5-6.
6. Концепція
навчання іноземних мов у середній загальноосвітній 12-річній школі./”English” №6, February 2004, pp.3-8.