Leave us Kids Alone

It is fundamentally essential for children to learn English from a young age in this rapidly globalizing world. English knowledge will help to open many opportunities for them in the future. However, teaching English to children is not an easy job. Compared to adults, children are more energetic and have shorter attention spans.  The growing interest in the area of Teaching English to Young Learners has led to the publication of methodology books as well as teaching programs. Yet the question still remains: What makes a good instructional program for young learners? As a teacher of very young learners you find yourself dealing with children who start crawling under tables or throwing bits of paper, others who don’t want to say or do anything, and others crying because they don’t want to be there! And, of course – while all this is happening – trying to teach English. Although instructional practice is seen to stand apart from theory, both theorists and practitioner...

Pronunciation can be one of the most difficult parts for a language learner to master. To make matters worse, the speech that learners encounter outside the classroom is much more wilder than the forms they encounter in the classroom. Such speech contains phenomena which are rarely seen in textbooks. They are squeezed into bursts of the stream of speech, and it becomes difficult to recognise where one word begins and another ends, or indeed whether word-endings, syllables, or whole words have occurred at all. It is widely believed that pronunciation skills are related to musical skills. However no link between musical ability and pronunciation ability has ever been demonstrated, and there are large numbers of people who have one of these  ‘natural talents’ but not both. The general consensus is that second language pronunciation is a cognitive skill for which some people may have more natural aptitude and / or interest and motivation than others, but which everyone can learn to a ...