9789144121574

‘ENGLISH IS FUN!’ ‘English is Fun!’

CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES ENGLISH IN YEARS 4 – 6

Sharon Ahlquist

Sharon Ahlquist

‘English is Fun!’ Challenges and Opportunities: English in years 4–6

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Art. No 39734 ISBN 978-91-44-12157-4 First edition 1:1 © The author and Studentlitteratur 2019 studentlitteratur.se Studentlitteratur AB, Lund Design: Lukas Möllersten, Lyth & Co Cover design: Francisco Ortega Cover illustration: Johnér bildbyrå Printed by Interak, Poland 2019

CONTENTS

1. English at School

11

Teaching English to young learners

12

The Young Learner

15

What do we know about child learners?

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

How can we help all our pupils to learn English?

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

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

What is so special about school years 4 to 6?

The national curriculum, Lgr11

2. Structuring a Lesson

15 16 20 23 25 27 30

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 Warm up 3: Flags

39 41

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

45

Language as a tool

49

6 3. Speaking and Listening Creating a meaningful context Task 1: The Oscars Task 2: The Kingdom of Water

53 54 55 63

Order of presentation

69

Focus on pronunciation

70

Exercise 1: Minimal Pairs

73

Exercise 2: Four Corners Exercise 3: Mark the Stress Exercise 4: The Odd-One-Out Exercise 5: The Phonetic Walk

4. Working with the information gap

74 74 75 76

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 Longer texts Writing: controlled, guided, free The Titanic A Day at the Beach Some final thoughts

106 109

110 111 115

119

7 6. Grammar and Vocabulary

121

Focus on meaning, focus on form

121

Grammar teaching and young learners Grammar teaching and Lgr11 Ways of teaching grammar Grammar in context

122 125 125 129

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 Characteristics of a good task

169 169

The painting: assessment for learning in the spoken language

172

The painting: assessment for learning in the written language

180

8 9. Planning lessons based on a textbook 187 Working towards an all-round communicative competence

188 189

Lesson one

193

Lesson two

194

Lesson three

197

Lesson four Discussion of our lesson planning

201 202

Scaffolding

203

Translanguaging 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?

Key Question 2: Where do you live?

Key Question 3: Who are our new neighbours?

214 217 218

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

224

Conclusion

231

R E F E R E N C E S 2 35

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3 Speaking and Listening

M an y years ago I visited a class of children in school year 5. I have

forgotten most of the content of this lesson, but one part sticks in my mind. The student teacher had written a text on the whiteboard and the pupils were required to read it aloud in chorus. With no great enthusiasm, the pupils did as they were asked. On the third reading, one boy turned away from the whiteboard to gaze around the room, with an expression of utter boredom on his face although he continued mouthing the words. After the fourth or fifth reading, the student teacher ended the lesson, but there was still a period of about ten minutes left. At this point, a number of the children clustered around their teacher, who then came to ask if they could talk to me. No sooner had I said ‘yes, of course’, than half the class were out of their seats. The first to reach me was the boy who had turned away from the whiteboard, telling me all about himself and his family, all signs of boredom gone.

The syllabus for English, as for all other subjects, requires teachers to take the individual needs and abilities of their pupils into consideration when planning lessons. When learners work on tasks that involve the spoken language, we have an inbuilt advantage – children are often very keen to speak English, even though they may be less keen to write it. They can see a real-life point to speaking the language, over and above completing work for school. In this chapter we are going to look at ways of making speaking tasks meaningful and therefore motivating.

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As we can see from the above example, going through the motions of reading from the whiteboard may give the learners a sense of how words feel in their mouths and how they sound, without being exposed to the criticism of others. That is a good start. But a task like this is not a speaking task, it is a reading aloud task. Speaking is about communication at some level, and it is a complex business. It requires the learner to choose words, put them together and say them, sometimes with little, if any, planning time, and plenty of opportunity for making mistakes in grammar, word choice, and pronunciation, all of which may cause difficulties in being understood. This requires courage on the part of the learner, and it explains why some pupils, when asked, after a period of work, about their development in speaking English, say that they ‘dare’ to talk more now. Reading aloud, for those who struggle with the written word and who may have short term memory problems, is actually a challenge. The pupils in the class described here have to decode the words on the board; mentally try to match them with the right sounds; produce those sounds accurately as they read aloud through the text on the whiteboard, and then keep all of this in mind for the next repetition of the text. To make things even harder, unlike reading from their book, they cannot use their fingers to follow the words and move from line to line.

By establishing a meaningful context, designing a task which addresses the learning objectives we want to work with, and allowing learners to use their own words, we are creating conditions for learning. The teaching approach we are using here is task-based learning and teaching (TBLT). According to the Belgian researcher, Kris van den Branden (2007), TBLT in the primary classroom leads to increased motivation and involvement. In addition, when learners repeat tasks, the familiarity of knowing what to do reduces anxiety and enhances self-confidence, both of which have a positive effect on a learner’s motivation and, thus, on their learning.

The first task we are going to consider is one that I have been using for a number of years with my student teachers at the very beginning of their studies in English. The best way to learn the advantages of a

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Creating a meaningful context

55 particular task is to try it for yourself. That is one reason we do it. The other is equally important: to build their self-confidence in speaking English in front of each other. At the beginning of their second term, they are still relatively unfamiliar with many of their classmates.

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Task 1: The Oscars The learners begin by reading the instructions. In their groups, they are going to write and perform a short script. They will first hear a piece of music. This represents the theme music for a film which has been nominated for one or more awards at the annual Oscars. The script they are to write involves the television evening news, when an announcement about the film’s nomination is made. From the television studio, the scene shifts to Hollywood, where a reporter interviews the actors and director about the film. Part of the task is to write the script; another is to edit it for language accuracy; the third part is rehearsal, and the final part is to perform the role play.

The students have to send me their written script, stating what language issues were discussed as they created and then edited it. They have to add what they focused on during the rehearsal stage. Finally, as student teachers, they should think about why I asked them to consider aspects of language awareness (grammar, word choice, and pronunciation) in this way.

This task has the potential to appeal to all our learners. The younger ones may lack the language range of the older learners, but are less likely to be hampered by self-consciousness. How much of an issue self-consciousness is depends on the classroom climate, and whether or not the pupils are used to working in this creative and more independent way. Where this is not the case, it would be a good idea to start with smaller tasks or let the learners just perform in smaller groups. We will deal more fully with working in pairs and groups in Chapter 4.

With older learners, we need in our teaching to achieve a balance between a focus on meaning and on form. Referring to the teaching of grammar within a task-based learning and teaching framework, Van den Branden (2016) makes the point that ‘explicit teaching aids lan-

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guage learning, particularly when it is skillfully integrated with the performance of holistic, situated, purposeful and meaningful activity’ (p241). By building a language focus into a meaningful task, by showing how accuracy in language choice and pronunciation contribute to a clear message, we are on our way to motivating our learners to spend time on these issues and to learn from the time spent. Language focus is achieved when we ask the learner to think about the language – the grammatical structures, vocabulary, word order, punctuation, and pronunciation – and engage with it (Svalberg, 2009). Without this focus, our learners will concentrate, perhaps understandably, on the content of what they want to say and spend less time on the accuracy of how they say it.

Wherever we have speaking, we have, of course, listening. On the one hand, the group performing their role play may have the script and they may follow this to larger or lesser extents. This affects the amount of listening they need to do within the group, since they know what all the others are going to say. Alternatively, they may have only their own lines written down and therefore have to listen for the words of the person who speaks before they do. I am always impressed by just how much of the script the student teachers are able to deliver with minimal reference to the written text, given how little time they have for the whole task (just two group study sessions). Pupils too will vary in how much they need to refer to their script, and this presents a good opportunity to talk about the difference between reading from the script, and not. Issues such as eye contact, use of body language, differences in intonation, and the speed of delivery all arise in this context, as does the need for closer listening to the rest of the group when one is reliant on what they say to cue one’s own next line.

This takes us on to the subject of active listening. I usually let the first group perform their role play and then I ask the audience what the film was called, what the plot was, and the names of the actors and/or characters. The accuracy of the answers varies. When the next group perform, the audience is now primed to listen because they know, or suspect, they will be asked about these details. This gives us an opportunity to talk about what active listening means: what it looks, sounds, and feels like. Responses here include using facial

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57 expression and eye contact to signal engagement; and in conversation, using words such as OK, right, great, and so on, to convey the message that one is listening. Imagine how it would feel if you were talking to someone and they made absolutely no verbal response. We take these words for granted in our own language, but they have to be learnt in another.

In a role play, active listening might be signalled by laughter in an appropriate place. As for what active listening feels like – the first group are generally able to answer this when the audience collectively fail to pick up some of the information given in their role play! I think that this discussion is equally worthwhile with young learners, partly because being an active listener is an important social skill, but also because active listening develops the learner’s ability to listen effectively for information.

When the third group perform, I ask the audience to try another way to approach the listening. Here, they divide the task in their groups: one person will listen for the title of the film, another for the plot, and so on. In this instance, the cooperative learning principle of individual responsibility applies. At the same time, we are also making the task more manageable for the less proficient learners.

For example, they can be asked to listen for the title of the film or the names of the characters. The more proficient can listen for the plot details, which is a harder task. Before the groups answer any questions, the members confer, pooling the information that they have.

At this stage, we discuss how, in feedback, the answers are very often given by the same people. Now we try out the cooperative learning technique of Numbered Heads. Having pooled their information, as we have just said, all the members of the group have the answers to all the questions – at least in theory. To ensure that this happens in practice, we tell them to number themselves 1 to 5 (if there are five in the group). The teacher will call on a particular number to answer the question. This might be: ‘What was the film about? I want the number 4s to answer.’ Since everyone is by now supposed to know everything anyway, what we are doing here goes the extra mile toward making sure that the learners are actively listening to each other and taking collective responsibility for the work of the group. Notice,

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incidentally, that the teacher here does not say, ‘number 4s – what was the film about?’ The second the teacher utters the words ‘number 4s’, the rest of the pupils risk losing focus because they know that the question is not for them.

After the performances, the students have some time to discuss a number of review questions in their groups. These questions ask them to consider: to what extent they used English and Swedish in their preparation of the role play; how they decided who would take the respective roles and how different this process might be with children, leading us on to the responsibility of the teacher in this task. Should the teacher decide who takes which role? What should the teacher do if a pupil does not want to take part? These are useful topics to reflect on from a pedagogical point of view. At the same time, when we ask learners to review how they worked, we are helping them to develop autonomy ­independence. Useful questions could be: when did you use Swedish, and why?; how did you write the script, decide on who would play which part, deal with disagreements, etc? As Robert Fisher (1995), an expert in children’s learning, points out, children are not born knowing how to work together. It is a process, and sometimes a painful one. By asking our pupils to think about what worked well and less well in their own collaboration, we can help the process become smoother and less painful as time goes by.

Let us now think about planning this lesson and taking into consideration the needs of the pupils in our class. The first thing to say is that everyone will benefit from explicit instructions, and the balance here is to give just enough information to make the task clear.

Reading too much instruction might be a problem in itself, whether that is in English or Swedish. Is there any reason why we would give the instructions in Swedish? The answer to this is, quite possibly yes.

It depends on the level of our class. However, if we can give enough information in clear and simple English, then we will aim to do that.

The instructions should not themselves be a test of reading comprehension or be harder than the task itself. If we need to add some details in Swedish, so be it.

Sometimes, teachers instruct their pupils, either in writing or orally, to speak as much English as possible when they do group work.

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59 The intention – for the pupils to speak as much English as they can – is good. However, if the pupils can produce a better role play by discussing it in L1 – as is likely to be the case for the younger pupils and perhaps even some of the older ones, depending on the class – then this should not be seen as something negative. If the objective is to produce a role play, then that is where our focus lies, and it can very well be that our pupils produce a better result in L2 if they are allowed to get there using L1. By ‘get there’, I mean that they are able to discuss the task, reach compromises on what should be included, talk about the grammar and vocabulary needed for what they want to say, how to pronounce words, and even how to spell them, since they are writing a script. Allowing the use of L1 means that all of our learners can participate in a way that is less likely if we insist on use of L2 only. The consequence of this is that engagement, and therefore participation, in the task is likely to be greater among those pupils who might struggle to talk about the task and about the L2 in English.

This engagement is important for developing the autonomy which we mentioned above.

Phil Benson, whose research field includes learner autonomy, makes the point that autonomy is about taking control. But in order for learners to take control of their learning, their teacher has to create an environment in which this can happen. Benson highlights the link between autonomy and motivation, which is ‘enhanced when students are enabled to make choices and decisions about their learning’ (2016, p340). We have given our learners instructions to create a role play within a given framework. The framework and the instructions are the support we provide. The choices and decisions are made by the pupils as they work on creating their script. We can note here that this freedom is not just about the content of the script, but about how they should work. For example, should they write the script before allocating parts, or after they have decided who will play which role?

Can this decision be left to the pupils?

Further, they are also asked to consider language accuracy. Should they do this as they write the script, or write it first and then edit it? Whatever degree of freedom we allow our learners in the work process, what we will need to be clear on is the timeline: for writing

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60 and editing the script, and for rehearsing the role play. With sufficient planning and preparation time, learners may achieve a higher level of fluency and accuracy than they would otherwise do (Skehan, 1998), with all that that implies for their self-confidence, satisfaction, and continued motivation.

The task we have just described is one that requires a lot of class time.

Sometimes though, it can be useful to work on short, intensive tasks that focus on developing fluency. One such is the 3,2,1 method. The pupils work with a partner. They have had some time to prepare to talk about a subject, which might be a hobby they have. The first time they do this talk, they have three minutes. When they do it again, they have two minutes in which to give the same information. The final time, the limit is one minute, and once again, the aim is to give the same information. Familiarity with the language and the topic both work together to boost fluency. Notice that we are not concerned with accuracy here; our concern is fluency and getting our pupils to speak without fear of getting things wrong.

Similarly, we might work with something called Pressure Cooker.

Working in pairs, the pupils are told that they have to talk together about a given topic for, let us say, two minutes. They must not stop, even if it means repeating what they have said. To structure this more, one pupil can start to speak, then after some seconds, the teacher claps his or her hands to signal that the partner should take over. This is repeated, ping-pong style, every few seconds until the time is up, and the subject – and pupils – are quite exhausted. This task requires some level of proficiency, so a grade 6 is probably the earliest we might work with it. As always, though, this depends entirely on the proficiency levels in the class. A grade 5, used to speaking English, could manage quite well, while a grade 6 who do not speak much English could find it hard. It is also true to say that, regardless of proficiency, some pupils might find it stressful, while others will enjoy the challenge of keeping the talk going. Try it – once your pupils realize that accuracy is not the point here, they will relax, enjoy talking about a subject they

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Short tasks for developing fluency

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61 know, and may be very surprised by just how much they are able to say in a short time.

Notice that in Pressure Cooker, whether we structure it with individual turns or just let the talk flow, the focus is fluency development rather than that of listening. Our pupils will have to listen to each other in order to carry on the conversation, but if they fail to understand, they should still carry on talking. What these tasks have in common with the Oscars is that both the shorter tasks and the longer role play involve preparation, speaking, and responding to someone else. In the case of the Oscars, the pupils have their script to support them. In the case of Pressure Cooker, if they do not understand their partner, they keep on talking anyway. Both tasks are examples of dialogue – someone speaks, another continues. What both of them lack, however, is the requirement to respond spontaneously as we have to do in real life conversation. We will come to this in our next task, but before we do that, let us think about assessment for learning.

The task has two parts – a written script, which is a group effort, and the spoken performance. As we watch our pupils working on the script, we will observe learning going on as they discuss their word choices, spelling, how to say things in English, how they correct each other, and the kinds of disagreements that they have. Note that we would not have access to this information if our learners were forced to express their knowledge about English in English. Apart from listening to discussions about language, we will see what role each learner takes in the group: is it coming up with ideas, doing the writing, or the checking, or are they doing very little? Is one person dominating, are there some who have decided not to participate, are some pupils’ ideas ignored? This is all valuable information to add to our profile of each learner. Eventually though, we will have a joint script. If a learning objective was to show understanding of the question forms in English (for example) and to use adjectives to describe people, things, and emotions, then these are what we will assess.

Using three levels to correspond to the grades E, C, and A, we can say that at the very least we will expect to see that the script, on the one hand, contains questions which can be understood, and on the other, shows that the learners can use adjectives. At the next level, we might

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62 ask for some degree of accuracy in the questions and adjectives, as well as greater variety, and at the highest level we would expect to have a good degree of accuracy and a greater range of language. Of course, our focus might be on linking words and more complex sentences.

This is fine, but I would recommend that we do not try to assess too much in one task, unless we are prepared to have more detail in our assessment criteria. For instance, we might assess as follows: 1 Task achievement: have the learners produced a script

for the Oscars?

2 Coherence and cohesion: does the script make sense? Does it

flow through the use of linking words?

the focus of the task? Is punctuation correct?

4 Vocabulary: how accurate, varied and appropriate is the word

choice? Is spelling correct?

To use a more comprehensive scale like this is fairer in the sense that we can give credit where credit is due. It might be that our learners have good grammar, but poor spelling. Perhaps they have written a script on another subject, but their use of linking words – then, next, after that, because etc – is very good. Where we have only one set of criteria for each band – lower, middle and high – we have a problem since not everything might fit the band description.

When it comes to speaking, again we can think in terms of three levels, and this time we are able to assess individually. Can our pupils speak their lines with little support from the script? If they read from the script, they are doing just that – reading aloud. It is precisely reading aloud which causes problems for many pupils of low reading proficiency – reading dialogues in textbooks, for instance. What we want them to do here, and what they may be better at, is having a go. How willing are they do this? A willingness to try, regardless of how accurate the result, is an important first step in building self-confidence.

Do our learners use any strategies for dealing with language problems as they arise – using other words or explaining around a word

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3 Grammar: how varied and accurate is the grammar which was

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63 they have forgotten? Improvisation is a good thing, but we have to remember that in a role play, this affects more than the speaker who improvises. It requires quick thinking on the part of the others who are involved, especially the speaker who follows on. The learner who understands that their improvisation affects others and attempts to make up for this, perhaps by addressing the next speaker directly to hand over to them, is applying a strategy to keep communication going, and for that they would have credit.

When it comes to how much language the learner produces, at the lowest level we would assess whether the pupil is able to use simple sentences which can be understood. At the higher levels, we would listen for the amount of language the learner was able to produce at a stretch, word order, the variety of words, and to think about how easy they were to understand. We can think of easy in two ways – were grammar and vocabulary accurate, or at least accurate enough for the message to be clear, and was the pronunciation correct, or mostly so?

Task 2: The Kingdom of Water Let us look now at another task which, like the Oscars, requires more lesson time, but which creates a meaningful context in which our pupils can continue to develop their speaking and writing skills in English. This is something I work with early on with my student teachers. It is a scenario in which they, in their groups, represent the Swedish tourist board and they are going to an international fair.

Their task is to prepare a presentation on Vattenriket, the Kingdom of Water – the biosphere on our door step in Kristianstad. The presentation should be about five minutes long, in the form of a PowerPoint.

Each group is given a particular target audience, whose needs they should consider: pensioners, the disabled, families with younger and older children respectively, and foreign visitors to Sweden.

There are two reasons for the target audience, and they are related.

Different target audiences mean that the content of each presentation should be angled towards a particular group. This requires some imagination and creativity on the part of the presenting group, and the ability to improvise. If all the presentations were on the King-

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dom of Water generally, it would be easy, and tempting perhaps, to simply lift information from a website. The presentations would then probably say more or less the same thing. This would become boring and the audience would stop listening, which is a shame if the last group to present has put in just as much effort as the first. In our task, the listeners are kept busy taking on the role of a different target audience each time, thinking about the kinds of questions families or pensioners and so on might have. Are these questions answered in the presentation? The audience have to listen carefully. If their questions are not answered, they have to ask them.

Apart from the questioning, how can we ensure active listening?

As the teacher, what we can do is create a quiz. This can be based on the material that we know our learners will present. The pupils will complete the quiz first on their own or in pairs, and then with the rest of their group. We know that all the answers have been given by one or other of the groups because we know what they are going to say.

Another alternative is that we ask the groups themselves to provide questions for the quiz, based on what they are going to say. This is excellent practice in question-construction and in using the target vocabulary of the topic. As you go through the quiz, checking the responses, the different groups will be responsible for providing the correct answers. Since this task introduces the elements of game and competition, which are always popular with young learners, we can be sure that the class will be listening very carefully and challenging the answers where they disagree with them. The game Kahoot1 could be used in the quiz stage, or Socrative2, a tool which allows the teacher to create different kinds of questions on a topic.

We mentioned above that one reason for having a target audience is to avoid everyone presenting the same information and to keep the presentations interesting. But there is another point to this. When learners find facts on the internet, there is the risk that they will lift this information without processing it. Do they understand it? Where they are presenting material that they have not written themselves, do 1 2

https://kahoot.com https://www.socrative.com

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65 not fully understand, and have difficulty pronouncing, they are likely to read straight from a paper. This does not benefit their learning, nor that of the listeners, since if the material is too hard for the speaker, it is certainly too hard for the listener to understand. If they have found the information in L1 and either translated it themselves or used google translate, the results can be equally unfortunate, if not worse.

We want our speakers to be able to speak freely, with cards to prompt them, supported by a well-thought through presentation, consisting of words and pictures. The creation of such a PowerPoint presentation is an art in itself, and it addresses the requirements of the revised curriculum (2017) regarding digitalization. These are: understanding the impact of digitalization on society; the ability to use and understand digital tools and media; developing a critical and responsible approach to digital sources; being able to solve problems and put ideas into action. Though English is, rather curiously, one of the few subject syllabi which has not been revised to integrate this focus on digitalization, there is every reason why we should do so, and many meaningful ways to do it, such as the one we have discussed here.

To sum up, we can say that a task of this kind has a range of benefits. It involves the learner in finding and adapting information. They then have to think about presenting this adapted information to a specific receiver. Here, we are addressing the requirement in year 6 for adaptation to situation and receiver. We also ask our learners to do this in a group, which means that they have to be able to divide up the workload fairly. We then expect them to present the information they have chosen, adapted, prepared, and rehearsed. At this point we can add that rehearsal, unlike in our Oscar role play, will only take them so far. One important difference in this task is that we have an additional stage, when the audience can ask questions. The ability to respond to these questions calls for improvisation on the part of the speakers, as they might not have predicted the question and may not know the answer.

What we can say here is that a task of this kind allows the learner to practise two kinds of speaking: monologue and spontaneous interaction. Mike McCarthy, a well-known British researcher in the field of spoken English, points out that when we talk about oral fluency, there

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is a difference between being fluent when only you are speaking, and being fluent when you have to rely on understanding and responding to an interlocutor (the person with whom you are speaking) (McCarthy, 2010). This distinction is made in Lgr11, which refers to both oral production and oral interaction, and it is something which we need to bear in mind when we create tasks for the development of spoken fluency.

During my Storyline research (Ahlquist, 2013), I noticed that when the learners mingled as their characters, and, on a given signal, had to stop and talk to the nearest person, some pupils did one of two things. They either positioned themselves on the outskirts of the crowd, making sure there was no one near to talk to, or they stood near a friend. One sign of the development in their self-confidence was that this habit decreased as the Storyline progressed.

When, after the Storyline was completed, I interviewed the pupils about how they experienced a mingling task – not the sort of thing they normally did in English lessons, some of the responses were very enlightening. One pupil told me she was afraid that she would not understand what the other person said to her. In other words, this task was just as much about developing listening as about speaking. If you do not understand what someone has said, how can you respond?

Another pupil told me that she was disappointed that although she went up to others and asked questions, no one did the same to her.

Whether this was or was not the case does not really matter. This is how the child experienced the situation. What it underlines is the importance of creating a positive classroom climate, in which everyone feels comfortable. There is no getting away from the fact that any insecurities a learner might have will be revealed when we put them in a situation where they have to interact spontaneously.

At this stage, let us add a few words on assessment. To a point, we can use the same matrix for The Kingdom of Water as we used for our scripted Oscars, but only to a point. This task will tell us how well the learner can use English to respond to a question which is not scripted and to which they may not have an answer. To include this important difference, our three levels of assessment might be: that the pupil makes an attempt to answer spontaneously, but not always with

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67 success; that the pupil answers spontaneously and with some degree of success; or our pupil answers spontaneously, with a good degree of accuracy and appropriately most of the time. The last point here addresses the adaptation to receiver and situation.

Let us think now about the role of language awareness. We have said that we do not want our learners to copy from the internet, but to use their own words, even if they have used a website which is adapted for children. One reason for giving them a target audience is to cause them to adapt their material. When it comes to accuracy, there are two stages when this is important: when they are creating their PowerPoint and when they are rehearsing what to say. When you write instructions for the whole of this task, these two stages will be included with guidelines on what to think about. In the first stage, apart from the reminder not to include too much information on any one slide, we will tell them to think about, for example: spelling, use of capital letters, sentence structure, punctuation, third person s, and the apostrophe. With our oldest pupils, we would ask them to suggest which aspects of language correctness they think are most important.

The second stage will involve pronunciation of individual words and rehearsal of speaking whole sentences, pausing, varying the tone of voice, and using eye contact to engage their audience.

The list of topics suitable for presentation is a long one. It could be a topic that has been covered in another subject, and in Swedish, which provides a basis for what we now do in English. In doing this, the pupils would be recycling a familiar topic in another language.

This would be a way of reviewing the topic itself – a chance to understand it better and to learn more about it. Alternatively, it could be a topic based on the chapter we are working on in a textbook, or something to do with the local area, as in the example I have given from my area. A good starting point could be to let the learners choose in their group something they would like to tell the class about. It could be anything, from their favourite hobbies, to the overuse of plastic in society, or child poverty in the world. As we said earlier, learner autonomy, which is positively linked to learning, allows learners to make meaningful choices. Only we can create the circumstances in which our pupils are able to make meaningful choices.

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Sharon Ahlquist, Doctor of Education, is a senior lecturer in TESOL and applied linguistics at Kristianstad University, where she works in teacher education. Her research interests are young language learners, the Storyline approach and the role of children’s fiction in second language education.

CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES ENGLISH IN YEARS 4 – 6 Every teacher knows that there are as many individual differences as there are pupils in the class. Meeting the needs of everyone is a challenge which calls for creativity in lesson content and teaching approach.

When children are engaged and enjoying themselves, they are likely to learn more, which is a reward for any teacher. The purpose with this book is to show how English can and should be fun, for teacher and pupil alike, using examples of practical classroom tasks, linked to theories of how children learn a second language.

The chapters discuss, among other things, the importance of creating a positive classroom climate, how to plan an effective English lesson, use pair/group work, and not least, how different kinds of tasks can provide evidence of learning. The book aims to demonstrate that, by varying lesson content and the way we work with it, we are able to meet the needs of every learner, regardless of individual differences.

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‘ENGLISH IS FUN!’

‘English is Fun!’ is intended to appeal particularly to teachers of school grades 4–6, though many of the tasks presented in the book can be adapted for both younger and older learners.

Art.nr 39734 ISBN 978-91-44-12157-4 3. S p ea k i n g an d L i sten i n g

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