n do this by making sure we make full use of gesture, intonation, demonstration, actions and facial expressions to convey meaning parallel to what we are saying. We must also try not to undermine the children s willingness to use the skill.
3. Children s creative use of limited language resources
the early stages of their mother tongue development children excel at making a little language go a long way. They are creative with grammatical forms. They are also creative with concepts. Children also create words by analogy, or they even invent completely new words which then come into the family vocabulary. This phenomenon is fundamental language development. In order to make the most of the creative language skill the children bring with them, we therefore have to provide them occasions when:
- the urge to communicate makes them find some way of expressing themselves;
- the language demanded by the activity is unpredictable and isn t just asking the children to repeat set phrases, but it encouraging them to construct language actively for themselves.is why games are so useful and so important. It is not just because they are fun. It is partly because the fun element creates a desire to communicate and partly because games can create unpredictability.we acknowledge the need for unpredictability, it follows that in addition to occasions when the children practice learnt dialogue or other specific language items under close teacher guidance, there will also need to be occasions when we set up an activity and then leave the children to get on with it.
. Children s capacity for indirect learning
when teachers are controlling an activity fairly closely, children sometimes seem to notice something out of the corner of their eye and to remember it better than they were actually supposed to be learning. At times this can be a frustrating experience for the teacher but this capacity too can be turned to our advantage in the language classroom. It is part of the rather complex phenomenon of indirect learning.activities which involve children in guessing what phrase or word someone has thought of are very good examples of this phenomenon in action. As far as the children are concerned, they are not trying to learn phrases: they are concentrating on trying to guess right. However, by the time they have finished the repeated guessing, they will have confirmed words and structures they only half knew at the beginning. They will have got the phrases firmly into their minds. They will probably even have adjusted their pronunciation. Guessing is actually a very powerful way of learning phrases and str...
