LISTENING, ORAL WORK, READING, AND WRITING

Working with children in the four skill of the English language; listening, oral work, reading and writing, has been a great experience and a big challenge. We had to deal with many difficulties, such as: classroom management, student’s limitation and school resources.

Listening is the first stage that children face when they learn a language, but sometimes it is difficult to make them learn it easily, so teachers have to use good strategies. The pupils are accustom to repetition; therefore, it is better to teach them by repetition. Student teachers have to speak clearly the simple structures in class because children have a short attention span at young ages.

Another skill to improve is speaking, as they listening, they repeat. In this case the teachers must be aware of the structure they use in class. As teachers, we faced some limitations from the pupils; they cannot express themselves perfectly in their first language, so that it is going to be more difficult to express in English what is expected from the teacher. We may find the balance in which the teachers have to guide the activities, participation, and practice of the language using useful methods and the correct material to the age from 4, 5 and 6 years old kids.

Reading is a skill that happens before writing, so children will see the word or letter, and write it down on a page. Even though they do not master this skill in Spanish, they have to use it in English. Knowing some words and letters in Spanish will be helpful for children to understand it in the new language and the reason is that Spanish alphabet has a close relationship with the English alphabet. In short, the teacher have to teach them a few set of words and use picture cards with the new word.

The last skill in the list but really important is writing. As teachers, we could assume that children can easily write a word or a short sentence in Spanish, but this is not in that way, they are still in the process of learning the mechanism of constructing words and sentences with meaning. Consequently, our experience with children was not easy when they started writing in English, so teachers have to provide activities to write words using a picture in the kindergarten classroom.

Activities based on the book “teaching English to children” how they worked in our teaching context.

Listening activities worked very well when we were teaching. As teachers, we develop activities of moving about that were required because children at those ages need a lot of physical movement. Other activities developed in our classes were telling stories, pointed out a picture after hear it, rhymes and songs. We just chanced some features at the time of telling stories because we have to assimilate the knowledge they have with the content of English.

Making our children to speak is one of the most difficult tasks. To produce a new language is difficult at any age, so teachers must be careful with the type of activities they use. For example activities with drawings were perfect to make them pronounce a word in English. In our experience with children, they reproduced a word quickly using charts, picture cards and short dialogues.

Activities to develop the reading skills were focused more on look and say the word using flash cards and charts to make children read it. Students were accustomed to say the vowels and consonants by repetition, so it was easier to read the vowel and alphabet by reading a set of word one by one.

Teaching children to write was the more difficult part. They did not learn to write a lot of words in English but they learnt how to identify some of them. Most of student teachers were not focused on teaching the writing skill because the pupils were in K4, K5 and K6. Therefore, the methods using to develop this skill were focused on pictures and words matching in order not make the pupils write a lot.

These activities were not tried in our teaching experience. Some did work, but others did not work. Note: some activities were for older ages.

Listening

Ø  Listening in order: Pupils were able to identify every figure and put it in order.

Ø  Filling the missing information: Children at the age of 4,5 and six years old were not able to fill the missing information by themselves.

Speaking

Ø  Role play: At younger ages is impossible to make children memorize a dialogue in a new language in the first classes.

Ø  Telling the time: Kindergarten children cannot understand the way that numbers work.

Reading

Ø  Look and say: This activity was great because children can easily identify the word-picture correctly.

Ø  Whole sentence reading:  If they cannot manage the use of the first language in reading, they will no able to do it in the new language, but after of a lot of practice.

Writing

Ø Dictation: Children are not able to write long paragraphs but simple words, so you must be aware of the use of activities in writing.

Ø  Descriptions: They are able to describe at least by speaking but not by writing a sentence or paragraph