uctures, but it is indirect because the mind is engaged with the task and is not focusing on the language.primary school level the children capacity for conscious leaning of forms and grammatical patterns is still relatively undeveloped. In contrast, all children, whether they prefer to sort things out or muddle through , bring with them an enormous instinct for indirect learning. If we are to make the most of that asset we need to build on it quite deliberately and very fully.
. Children s instinct for play and fun
have an enormous capacity for finding and making fun. Sometimes, it has to be said, they choose the most inconvenient moments to indulge it! They bring a spark of individuality and of drama to much that they do. When engaged in guessing activities children nearly always inject their own element of drama into their hiding of the prompt-cards and their reactions to the guesses of their classmates. They shuffle their cards ostentatiously under the table so that the others can t see. They may utter an increasingly triumphant or smug No! as the others fail to guess. They stare hard at the rest of the class, they frown or they glower. Here their personalities emerge, woven into the language use. In this way, they make the language their own. That is why it is such very powerful contribution to learning. Through their sense of fun and play, the children are living the language for real. Yet again we can see why games have such a central role to play. But the games are not the only way in which individual personalities surface in the language classroom. There is also the whole area of ​​imaginative thinking.
6. The role of imagination
delight in imagination and fantasy. It is more than simply a matter of enjoyment. In the primary school, children are very busing making sense of the world about them. They are identifying pattern and also deviation from that pattern. Thy test out their versions of the world through fantasy and confirm how the world actually is by imaging how it might be different. In the language classroom this capacity for fantasy and imagination has a very constructive part to play.teaching should be concerned with real life. But it would be a great pity if we were so concerned to promote reality in the classroom that we forgot that reality for the children includes imagination and fantasy. The act of fantasizing, of imagining, is very much an authentic part of being a child. If we accept the role of the imagination in children s lives we can see that it provides another very powerful stimulus for real languag...
