Teaching English at the Elementary Stage

Elementary stage can occur everywhere (at university, school, etc.)

Today educational policy in Russian is to introduce foreign language studies in the 1^st form in order to make the best advantage of the most impressionable years of the schoolchildren in which languages are acquired easily and naturally. The necessity of acquiring 2 alphabetical systems at once is difficult technically and psychologically, because the processes of learning to read and write in 2 languages are related to the same areas in the brain and thence a lot of interference in spelling letters, words, etc. That’s why at the early stage preferences are given to oral skills – listening and speaking. During the oral skill development learners are to assimilate the alphabet and the basic letter-sound relationships (the rules of reading), so in some text-books for first graders authors introduce specific characters (Mr. Letter and Mr. Tongue, Mr. Rule). There is no exact correspondence between the order of presenting sounds and the order of presenting letters. Letters lie behind and are given in the alphabetical order. Usually a letter per lesson. That’s why during the 1^st lessons the 1^st graders have nothing to rely on, but pictures and Russian directions. To compensate for it teachers try to use direct demonstration in order to explain grammar structures/

e.g. “Enjoy English” In this book they introduce the following system of symbols (действующее лицо, действующее лицо (he, she, it), глагол-связка, глагол, обозначающий действие, чувство, состояние, …

Посмотри на 2 зашифрованных рассказа и выбери тот, в котором Красная Шапочка рассказывает о себе.

Psychological peculiarities of

There are 4 stages of cognitive development:

1. sensorimotor - birth to 2 years
2. preoperational – 2 years – 6 years
3. concrete operations – 7 – 11 years
4. formal operations (abstract thinking) – 12 years …

Early schoolchildren:

• need tangible things to assist learning (toys, cards with letters, handout pictures, …)
• rely more on imagery than on logic
• focus on playing as the target activity, while learning English is but a means to an end
• are incapable of producing a monologue of considerable length; even in the mother tongue they can’t do it, therefore if you want a lengthy description or narration – let it be a joint effort
• may even remain silent for some time (the so-called latent period)
• are emotionally vulnerable
• unlike pre-school children early ones already begin to develop logical thinking, they can acquire the language consciously (though the rules are based on games, analogies with Russian or images)
• lexical units are selected according to the age. Fairy tales, animated cartoons, and computer games necessitate introduction of exotic animals and movements (crawl, fly, climb, etc.). This a good chance to provide exercise in class. And there can be games (e.g. one shows some movement, the other one says: “You’re climbing, reading”. e.g. I’m an animal. I can do many things. I can … swim, run (shows the actions)) Therefore movements necessitate introduction of Can and Can’t and the names of animals in their turn necessitate some adjectives to describe them. Thus all the groups of vocabulary serve the needs of each other and no word should remain idle. This concerns all the stages.
• young schoolchildren easily get tired, so there must be more frequent switching over from one activity to another (including those with physical exercise)
• the integrity of a class as viewed by the learners is ensured by a “scenario”
• rigid forms of drills are camouflaged as communication. Use chain work drills.
• receptive tasks can be very simple in language and logic and yet provide an intellectual challenge (listen and guess what season, animal, piece of furniture it is; Look at the pictures and captions under them, maybe there must be something changed; Look at the list of things and say which of them you take to the country, to your friend’s birthday party)
• for language puzzles provide the learners with tangible handouts, cards with letters to think of a word and exchange the sets of letters
• non-verbal activities can include drawing which prevent monotony (give directions what to draw detail by detail
• longer utterance may come as a joint effort
• when evaluating the performance, remember the extra-linguistic aspect, too
• with a comics (read and match: draw a picture, tear out a page – imperative constructions)
• when they start learning to read they can use ready-made patterns – to avoid the monotony of formal drills you can use pictures that create a problem e.g. a piece of picture that makes it possible to guess the object but with some difficulty
• provide useful speech patterns (Take it Ben. It’s a pen. Take it, pal. It’s a bag).