No Room for Indifference or Boredom in a Class with Young Children

My name is Veronika Busygina and I am a teacher of English in gymnasium #1 in the town of Zheleznodorozhny near Moscow. I have been working as a school teacher for more than 15 years. I think that love for the profession is the main thing in our work. If you love your work sincerely, you won’t slow down. You will set new tasks for yourself and find the ways of accomplishing them.

Every child comes to school with the wish to learn and it’s a pity that sometime later this often turns into colourless indifference. We can speak a lot about the causes of such change but, my dear colleagues, we often promote it ourselves. From the first days at school we start building relations with our students and it is very good if we build them on the basis of mutual comprehension and confidence. It’s good when we try to make every lesson interesting and engaging. Otherwise, we won’t be able to motivate our students. A favourable climate in the lessons also depends on the methodological complex the teacher works with.

Some years ago we began teaching English starting with the second form. I didn’t like the books we were using at that time. They were based on a traditional approach, they started with the alphabet and made accented phonics and the letters. It is very important for young children to have colourful textbooks they like and enjoy looking at and handling. The books I worked with were dull and, though there were some pictures in them, they were neither attractive nor bright.

I started looking for textbooks which would be interesting to both me and my students. As a result, my school chose “Join Us” by Herbert Puchta and Gunter Gerngross published by Cambridge University Press. I am very grateful to Ludmila Gorodetskaya, a CUP consultant who gave me a lot of advice on how to determine the methodological and personal suitability of teaching materials.

In 2008 I wrote an author’s programme of English for primary school that covered the first to the fourth forms. The programme was approved by the State Academy of Post-Diploma Education, and we started working. In 2008-09 two groups of children were learning English from the first form according to my programme. I am happy to say that since then my primary school students have invariably loved their English lessons. They are glad to meet their English teacher and their favourite heroes: Toby, Pit, Pat, Mike, Emma, and Magic. The process of learning English is interesting and enjoyable both for the students and the teacher.

In 2009-10 eight groups of young children are starting their English classes in the first form, in accordance with my programme. “Join Us” is conceptually based on the theory of Multiple Intelligences. This theory maintains that children learn and remember a foreign language better if the learning process involves all their senses. Toby the Tiger involves the learners in various activities: they sing, draw and role-play together. Children learn English in the manner that is most suitable for various types of intelligences thus developing their inborn potential.

Linguistic Intelligence develops through specially designed grammar and vocabulary exercises based on pair work in dialogues. We can distinguish two stages of working with the language material: first, the teacher presents new materials when the books are closed and then students work on it with their books opened. Visual intelligence is developed when students do exercises supported by pictures or use flash-cards. They reconstruct dialogues and stories with the help of stickers. Musical-rhythmical intelligence is activated when children listen to and imitate intonation and rhythm, sing songs and recite verses. Logical-mathematical intelligence is based on solving problems and puzzles, counting, analyzing elements of the whole, doing ‘odd one out’ tasks. Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence expresses itself in physical activities and movement: role-play, games, making posters and doing projects. Interpersonal intelligence is necessary in pair and group work, games and team activities. Intrapersonal intelligence is based on silent individual work and self-reflection. Only a combination of differently-aimed activities guarantees success in developing pupils’ mental abilities together with communicative skills.

One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive psychology is that the memory does not reside solely in the brain but is supported by the whole body. For this reason, many activities in “Join Us”, in particular those where Toby the Tiger asks children to follow his instructions, are based on Total Physical Response (TPR). Children imitate Toby’s actions kinesthetically: they move and say what they are doing.

The process of learning a second language, in our case English, must be similar to learning the first language, where listening develops before speaking. In this way, communicative skills develop in a natural, spontaneous way. However, Russian teachers who are used to explaining new structures before teaching pupils to communicate, may add, in small doses, traditional Russian activities such as introducing phonetic transcription, drilling isolated sounds, as well as learning grammar rules, to highly communicative activities provided by “Join Us”. The main principle, however, is not to overestimate the power of explanation and not to forget about communication.

We live in time when information technologies play a very important role in education: their use in foreign language teaching raises motivation, facilitates students’ cognitive activities and helps to create a favourable psychological atmosphere in the classroom. That is why, in addition to books, I decided to use “English with Toby” – a multimedia supplement to “Join Us”. Children’s friends Toby, Pit and Pat play, sing and invite them to compete in interactive activities. When we use computers in class, the process of developing receptive and productive skills becomes more interesting. The heroes live on the screen, they move, speak English and ask questions. Every student has to work creatively to get a good mark from the computer. They always get a mark: excellent, very good or not bad. When they have done a very good job, they hear applause or see Toby giving them a cake or a bunch of flowers. Using computers adds fun and motivation: children work with pleasure and nobody leaves the lessons disappointed. It is worth remembering that every child has his or her own inner incentive for learning a foreign language and the teacher’s task is to develop this motivation. Students work with computers only 10 or 15 minutes in class, while the emotional effect of this work is alive throughout the lesson. Our students differ from each other, some of them catch the information very quickly while others need more time to understand the task. If the teacher puts such children into groups and gives them a team task, all the students will feel responsible for the result of the work and contribute to it.

The method of project work is worth mentioning too: it gives every student a good chance to show their creative individuality and develops their team spirit at the same time. There is a special section called Project time in “Join Us”. A project is not only a power-point presentation. It can be a report, a poster, a play – any child’s fantasy. We can teach our students to dream in order to realize their creative personality, rather than lock into the frames of convention.

For me as a teacher of English, it is very important to keep children’s interest in my subject, to see the joyful desire to know more and more in the best eyes in the world – the eyes of children. That is what we are all working for.