Tag: chinese very young learners

This article is aimed at newer teachers but comments and insights from experienced teachers are also welcome. As I mentioned in a previous article, kindergarten classes are more focused on speaking and listening skills, though at the K-2 and K-3 level you can add in some light reading and writing skill practice. Because the students have generally not yet developed any writing skills in their L1, they generally are unable to write in English as well. You will occasionally get outliers whose parents have taught them at home or who have learned through after-school classes. I will go through each of the possible stages of a class and touch on the language skills you will be focusing on with each one.

Lead in: In general, this will be greetings and eventually some light dialogue at K-2 and K-3 level. I’ve found this a good time to review previously learned sentence structures, usually in the form of questions and answers. I generally have a few questions that always have the same answer, followed by a few with answers that change. This allows the students to be comfortable in answering the first questions then experiment when answering the later questions. You can also include a warm up song though I’ve found it best to either have a song that somehow relates to the lexis you will be teaching for K-2 and K-3. For pre-K and K-1, you will generally want some type of action song. I’ve also found the warm-up song a good way to introduce list songs of topics you aren’t actively learning but want the students to eventually know like days of the week, months of the year, planets or to review the alphabet or numbers. This part of the class is not focused on a specific language skill but it’s more to get the students hyped up though they are practicing their listening and speaking skills.

Songs: If your syllabus includes songs then you will actively teach them in class. If it’s possible, find a video of the song using the same music and with the same words and show it to the students the first time you introduce the song. If you can’t find a video, then play the whole song through while doing the actions. If you are doing the same class daily, as is often the case in kindergarten, you don’t need to try to teach them the words in the same class but can space out teaching the actual song and just familiarize them with the actions and music on the first day. With K-2 and K-3 you can do some listening for gist practice when first introducing the song. While teaching the words you’ll be focusing on speaking accuracy but once they get it down, you’ll be focusing on speaking fluency. . You can progressively make the singing groups smaller and smaller for example: class > rows > 5 > 3> 2> 1. You’ll probably only get a few students comfortable singing solo but most will be happy to do it with a partner. I’ve found that the students enjoy the songs more when there is some type of gimmick for them to do, like a weird action or sound at the end of the song. For example, if you are teaching “You are my sunshine,” at the end of the song you can have your students do an exaggerated crying action complete with loud bawling noises.

Lexis: This is the part of the class where you will be introducing new vocabulary or sentence structures. Naturally you will be focusing on speaking accuracy but once they get the words and sentences down, speaking fluency can play a bigger part while you teach the proper intonation and connected speech. There are many different ways to model and drill and you can definitely throw in some variation by using different group sizes like for songs. Most of the time you will be using flashcards or a PowerPoint to introduce the new words but when applicable you can use realia as well. I will not go into details on how to introduce lexis to the class but there’s no wrong way to do it as long as you are making it interesting for the students.

Controlled practice: This is the activity part of the class where the students will be practicing using the lexis and sentence structures you’ve been teaching them. Depending on your class, this can range from word games to mini role playing. I’m not going to go into details here of what you can do as activities but I will probably do a future post with a number of activities. You’ll be focusing mostly on speaking accuracy but you can also change it up and fit in listening for details practice and speaking fluency. The main aim is to make sure that each student gets to participate and practice using the lexis and sentence structures but this doesn’t mean you have to go one by one. Groups of 2-4 students are generally ideal as you will go through all the students quicker. If you have a whiteboard or blackboard you can also fit in some writing practice in K-3, but since this is a lot slower and writing usually takes students more time than speaking, you will have to see how this fits in with your class and how you can keep the rest of the students paying attention while they wait their turn. In a thirty-minute class you will usually have time for two fast paced activities or one longer drawn out one.

Closing: You’ll want to do some language feedback by going over the lexis and sentence structure and doing some final modelling and drilling at the end of each class. If you are using a reward system, then this is when you would hand out rewards or have the students clean up whatever set up you were using for your activity.  For pre-K and K-1 you can sometimes fit in a closing song, but it’s not necessary for K-2 or K-3 unless you’ve had a really long practice session and want to get all the students paying attention again. What I sometimes do is when the students are learning two different songs at the same time, I will have them sing whatever song we haven’t focused on during the lesson to keep it fresh in their memory.

The two unchangeable parts of the lesson are the lead-in and the closing. For the rest you can mix and match according to your syllabus or whatever language skills you are focusing on. I wouldn’t spend a whole class on songs unless your whole syllabus is in fact only songs but generally ten minutes out of a twenty-five minute or thirty-minute class is enough. For a thirty-minute class you could break it down to something like this:

               Lead-in: 5 minutes

               Songs: 5 minutes

               Lexis: 5 minutes

               Controlled practice: 10 minutes

               Closing: 5 minutes

You can always change the middle stages around. For example, if you have a fun activity for the controlled practice and you want to make sure all the students have time to participate, you could do your controlled practice directly after your lead-in and then do songs time permitting or quickly as a closing. The most important thing is to use your judgment for what are the best stages for your class and what stages will best achieve the aims you have for your class.

               Now that I’ve got my provisional Pass A for the CELTA (spoiler alert), I’m not quite sure what to do next. I can’t really change jobs at the moment and my current job, teaching English in a kindergarten, while paying quite well, doesn’t lend itself to the kind of research wanted by a Masters. Then again, it hasn’t been that long since the CELTA finished and I’m not going to jump into anything until the end of the year so I have time to think about future plans. My main preoccupation at the moment is applying what I’ve learned from the CELTA to my teaching, even in a kindergarten.

               Having passed the CELTA, I feel I have more to contribute when talking about teaching so I’ll be doing the occasional blog on the subject. During my week’s holiday before returning to work, I did a “needs analysis” for Chinese very young learners. This isn’t the needs analysis itself but just some thoughts I had while writing it. I did the analysis in two parts. The first part was about L1 interference for Chinese very young learners in the language system and the second was on the development of Chinese very young learners’ language skills in a kindergarten environment. This analysis concerns English as taught in a kindergarten and not in a training center.

               For the first part, I went over the section on Chinese learners of English in Learner English (Swan, M. 2001, CUP) and considered if Chinese very young learners have the same problems and if so how they can be countered. Chinese adult learners have a lot of Chinese language or L1 interference, mostly because of the difference in the languages. It seems to me that Chinese very young learners don’t have the “active” L1 interference that Chinese adult learners do. For example, in Chinese there is no /v/ sound so Chinese adult learners will often say /w/ instead, simply because they have no practice using the /v/ sound in their daily life. Another example would be the problems Chinese adult learners often have with correct grammar, like using articles in the correct way. Chinese very young learners don’t have the same “active” L1 interference because when they start kindergarten at the age of 2-5, they haven’t actually learned to speak, read and write their L1 fluently and they don’t have years of experience using a different language system. They don’t speak English using Chinese grammar rules because they haven’t learned them yet. What Chinese very young learners face is a “passive” L1 interference in that, left to their own devices and their daily Chinese language environment, they aren’t going to learn English phonetics and will eventually move on to an “active” L1 interference when their Chinese level gets fluent enough.

               The role of an English teacher in kindergarten is thus not to train them out of using L1 sounds but to train them into using L2 sounds they do not hear on a daily basis from their L1, before they’ve had a chance to let their L1 fluency interfere with their learning of the L2. To build upon the previous example, Chinese very young learners will not automatically substitute /w/ for /v/ because of language memory but will use /w/ because they don’t know the sound of /v/. You are probably saying they are still pronouncing /w/ as /v/ so what’s the difference? The difference is in the reason for their error in pronunciation. The job of their L2 teacher is therefore to introduce them to the L2 sounds that are not present in their L1 and model and drill them so that the L2 sounds become as natural to them as the L1 sound. This actually requires less effort than with adult learners as the very young learners will accept the new sounds as just another sound amidst all the language sounds they are learning in both their L1 and L2. If taught correctly, the L2 sounds will be acquired by the very young learner in parallel to their L1 sounds and in the future they will have a much easier time of speaking the L2. They also don’t have a problem with false equivalents like adult learners as very young learners don’t have the lexis knowledge to replace one word with another but will simply use an L1 word when they don’t know how to say a word in the L2. While this presents a different problem, when new lexis is introduced they will automatically use the new lexis.

               For the second part of my needs analysis, I looked at the language skills that are taught to Chinese very young learners. Most of the focus is on listening and speaking. For listening, most of the teaching is focused on the sub-skills of listening for gist and listening for details. Most of the listening practice comes from songs, teaching instructions and learning lexis. Speaking is probably the most developed skill, though usually only the sub-skill of accuracy is generally emphasized. Students will generally develop their speaking accuracy as they learn lexis or the words to songs as modeled and drilled by the teacher. Speaking fluency is occasionally developed for the older classes by either singing songs or using lexis in sentences and through simple dialogues. This is where most of the modeling and drilling will take place and while the teacher will not be writing out the meaning, form and pronunciation for the students to see, the teacher should be aware of it and have done a language analysis of the lexis being taught to see what sounds or other language issues could be difficult for the very young learners or should be emphasized in order to avoid future L1 interference.

               Reading and writing skills are generally not taught at the kindergarten level or if they are, as only an optional choice. Most Chinese very young learners will not do any reading in the classroom. If they have an advanced English level compared to their classmates, mostly from taking after-school English language classes, they will have developed some reading sub-skills of reading for gist and scanning for details. Writing will generally not be a main aim of a lesson for very young learners as they often have not even started their L1 writing. However, a syllabus can occasionally be based on a book whose exercises the very young learners will occasionally do.

               The L2 teacher in a kindergarten should therefore, on the one hand, focus on developing the usual listening sub-skills of listening for gist and listening for details and speaking skills of accuracy and fluency but on the other hand, they should also be on the lookout for occasions to develop the student’s reading skill, at the very least by the lexis being taught, and writing skill, possibly through their course book. Another option is to give optional graded listening, reading and writing tasks for the children to do at home, should their parents wish for more English language training.

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