III. Listening, Oral Work, Reading, and Writing

When teaching the different skills, we may say that Listening is the skill that children acquire first, especially, when they do not know how to read. Listen and repeat activities can help children learn quickly. Teachers can take advantage of it. Teachers can teach children by playing songs and it is a good way to start a class. By playing songs, children are motivated to study and to learn as much as possible. Speaking is the most demanding skill for teachers to teach even though part of the magic of teaching young children a foreign language is just another way of expressing what they want to express. The problem is that children have limitations in oral work because of their lack of actual language. But, there are many way in which a teacher can present a new language orally, such as using a mascot, puppets, or objects, showing them drawings, playing and singing songs. This strategy really helps students learn more effectively. 

By speaking, children want to show their emotions, feelings, intentions, and reactions, so teachers can help children by listening to them and making them feel part of the class. Reading and Writing are skills that young learners have not completely developed, but they are also an important part of the language learning experience. If children master the reading skill in their own language, it will have an effect on the initial stages of teaching reading in English. Some very young learners have not mastered the reading skill yet, so teachers must be aware of what their students need. Writing is, as well as reading, a skill that young learners do not master yet. Writing activities really help consolidate learning in the other skill areas, but it is complicated for the teachers to make that kind of activities because those activities must be tightly controlled, and they demand a lot of time.

Children really learn doing activities that they find enjoyable, such as playing games, listening to stories, singing songs, repeating words, etc. 

That is why teachers do need to be creative in their classes because it is not easy to catch children’s attention. We tried many different activities in our classes in order to make them more interesting for our children. It means that we have played, sung, and laughed with our children. Somehow, we turned into children when teaching them; we had to step out of our comfort zone in order to understand them.  As listening is the skill children acquire first, listening and repeating exercises are one of the most effective activities to teach English to very young learners. We tried many activities that were easier for our children to do. According to the age of our pupils, we could make activities using pairwork or grouping. We realized that some children do not like pairwork or grouping, which is normal because they like to have their own responsibilities. They really like when the teacher praises their own work.

There are many activities that we could not do in our practice because of the time and the age, the level, and the attention span of our children. Those are reading and writing activities, such as copying texts, dictations, and dialogues, writing and reading exercises. 

It is actually complicated to do those things with children because some of them do not even know how to read and how to write in their native language. This does not mean that reading and writing activities are less important. Indeed, they help consolidate the other skills, but to develop those skills, teachers need to be very careful about the kinds of activities they will develop in the class.