The Language Teacher
July 2002

Teacher Talk in the Primary English Classroom

Jane Willis

In my plenary talk at JALT 2002 in Shizuoka, I shall be exploring some current trends in ELT that are likely to become larger waves in the future. These include the use of more specifically designed corpora for syllabus and course design, the emphasis on features of spoken language, the identification of lexical chunks that fill the gap between vocabulary and grammar, and the implications of SLA research findings for second language teaching. Related to all of these is another major wave--teaching English to younger learners. It is this that I shall focus on in this paper.

Children Learning English

Listening to English is vital! Children can only learn English if they have sufficient exposure to it. They are natural language learners provided they experience the language in situations that engage their attention and encourage them to process language for meaning. But they can only acquire what they hear and attend to. So if they don't hear very much English, or if they do not listen and try to understand, they will learn very little.

They may not begin to speak English freely for some time, and in the early stages, it is difficult to observe their progress. But the more input they receive, the faster their comprehension will grow. And so will their ability to imitate intonation patterns and short familiar chunks, and, as a result, their ability to speak.

What is now clear from research findings (Lightbown & Spada, 1999) is that children are most unlikely to learn to speak English if input is restricted to pattern practice and vocabulary teaching. Younger children simply do not have the cognitive ability to make sense of grammar-based teaching or abstract descriptions of language. They need to experience meaning-focused interaction, and lots of it.

Teachers Teaching English

Speaking English in class is vital! The teacher's main role is to provide learners with rich exposure to English by speaking it a lot, and simplifying or elaborating, if necessary, in the same way that mothers and care takers do with young children learning their first language. This is often known as modified input (Lightbown & Spada, 1999, p. 34). This entails setting up situations in English lessons that actively engage children in trying to understand what is said, in order to do or achieve something and to have fun.

Teachers of English to adults who are new to teaching young learners may need to do less direct teaching, and learn how to set up activities appropriate to the age of the young learners such as activities which offer opportunities for natural acquisition.

Teachers at the primary level who are asked to start teaching English should be sufficiently competent in spoken English to enable them to interact naturally in English with their children, and give their learners the exposure they require to help them acquire it.

Making English Comprehensible

It is generally believed that comprehensible input can lead to natural acquisition. So in addition to simplifying or elaborating the English used with learners, how else can teachers help them understand? There are several options: (a) by using gesture, demonstration, and miming; (b) by giving visual or contextual clues; (c) by building on routines learners are familiar with and giving instructions for them in simple English; (d) by translating into the mother tongue.

Translation is useful if the children are really baffled and are beginning to lose confidence and give up. However, beware! If translation is regularly used, learners may stop trying to understand English. They will switch off, stop listening, and switch back on when they hear their own language, thereby missing opportunities to learn.

ESP for Primary Teachers

Teachers need to feel confident and positive about speaking English in class, but they don't need to be competent in all areas of English. The language needed for classroom management and setting up and handling activities is fairly specific. Topics suitable for children are quite predictable (family, monsters, the seasons, etc.), and teachers should be able to chat about various topics and involve children in exploring them. A basic repertoire of stories they can read and tell with dramatic expression can be built up gradually. Teachers can also bring in additional sources, such as recordings of stories and songs. All this should provide sufficient exposure to stimulate acquisition.

In order to identify exactly what language is typically used in English lessons, and to discover what activities are commonly used, I teamed up with an experienced primary teacher trainer, Mary Slattery,1 and we set about collecting data.

Collecting Data

We asked a number of teachers in different non-English speaking countries to audio-record their next English lesson and send it to us. We soon had a bank of recordings of around 30 primary lessons, the majority from non-native teachers, and with pupils from ages 4 to 12. This bank acted both as our research corpus (to enable us to draw up a syllabus of commonly used language), and as a pedagogic corpus (Willis & Willis, 1996), in other words as a source of material for a language course for teachers who needed to improve their English and to broaden their repertoire of primary level activities.

Analyzing Teacher Language

We looked in detail at around 20 lessons which together constituted what we felt was a representative sample of ages and levels, and we used the other lesson recordings as backup data--listening to them all to make sure we had not missed any important features of language or any major activity types.

We listed and classified activities into major categories, such as Listen and Do, Listen and Make, Speaking with Support, etc. We then looked for sub-categories like Total Physical Response activities and action rhymes. We identified commonly used topics, such as animals and food, and then we looked at popular textbooks and added to this list. Working with transcriptions of the recordings, we identified major functions of language use, and then we listed the different realizations for each one, looking for typical patterns.

Findings

We identified three broad categories of language use: (a) general classroom management, (b) activity-specific language, and (c) story-based language. These are listed below with an example or two for each.

General lesson functions

  1. Organizing the class
    Let's start with the first row; you go over there and leave a space.
  2. Establishing a routine
    Now what do we do when we are learning a new song?
  3. Saying what is going to happen
    I'm going to talk to you about a new person....
    What you are going to do now is....
  4. Commenting on what is happening now
    Oh the bell! The bell. Always the bell!
    OK, so you've got your colors out....
  5. Control and discipline
    OK, OK, calm down! Quiet everybody. Sssh. Now pay attention. Kevin is going to say the numbers. So, let me see everybody sitting down. Everybody sitting down.
  6. Turn-giving and eliciting
    Hands up!
    Now who wants to tell the whole story? OK, Vanessa, you start.
    Who can remember the words we wrote yesterday? Ali?
  7. Responding to learner talk: accepting, evaluating, rephrasing, extending (building on learners' responses)
    T: How many sisters have you got?
    Child: One.
    T: Very good. So you've got one sister.
  8. Recasting into English what a learner has said in mother tongue (Child says in L1 how the grey elephants in the picture look like an army)
    T: Yes, it looks like an army of elephants, doesn't it--all grey elephants. Yes.
  9. Encouraging individuals
    OK, Lea, let me see. Yes that's good. Do you want me to help?
  10. Ending activities and lessons
    OK, now! Put everything away.
    So that's all for today. On Monday there will be more.

This list is not exhaustive. There are many lesser-used categories, like socializing, checking understanding, and locating things in the course book, which occur in our data.

Activity-specific language

  1. Giving instructions for activities and games
    OK, in the envelope you have some pictures. Now take them out, OK? And put them in a line....
    OK, Laura, you throw the dice for your team...Team A, take the dice, and throw it...not at me! Come on! What have you got?
  2. Giving a commentary on activities
    Ok John, you're starting at his head, very good. Cutting round his head, his ears....
  3. Giving feedback during activities
    Right, so now we've got a foot and a leg. Is there a mistake? No--only one foot and one leg, fantastic.
    OK, let's check now. Show me...point to black nose, blue eyes, orange mouth, brown hair, yellow hands. Very good.
    Now we'll put these pictures up on the wall.... Very nice!

Guessing games like miming, matching activities, board games with or without dice, making things--all these activities have their own specific lexical sets and instructions. These can only really be learnt in context, by hearing and observing the actual game in action, and then leading the game for real and seeing what language is needed.

The language of organization and instructions for activities provided exposure to extremely rich and purpose-driven uses of English. Ironically, as many trainers observing primary lessons have noted, this is often carried out in the mother tongue, and teachers justify this by saying, "It is quicker." The question is, however, what is quicker? Getting down to the activity might initially be quicker until children get used to the routine, but is that the point? Will the child's actual learning be quicker? Ultimately, denying learners the learning opportunities that occur while they are processing instructions in English will reduce exposure and slow down their rate of learning.

Language generated through stories

The actual story can be either spoken or written narrative, and is often a combination of both. Teachers also used many different techniques for retelling the story and for follow-up activities. These generated a wide range of language use, both in terms of richness of vocabulary and variety of interaction patterns. We noted particularly: (a) a whole range of different question forms and elicitation techniques, a variety of tenses, and a wealth of noun phrases, for example a house made out of wood, a boy eating a sandwich; (b) children initiated more, often quite spontaneously, some repeating to themselves chunks from the story in English, some commenting in L1; (c) many teachers were adept at recasting learners' L1 comments into English; (d) they also took up learners' ideas, rephrasing and/or expanding them into natural samples of English.

Some functions typical of story-telling activities include:

  1. Reading, rephrasing, and extending story text
    T: He caught hold of the bush and shook it and shook it and all the berries fell on the ground. See him--he's shaking, shaking the bush. See them?...see them?...see all the berries?
    Child: See them...see them.
  2. Eliciting learner contributions
    What did Elmer say?
    And the others said?
    What's he going to do next? What do you think he'll do?
    What colour will he be? Will he be yellow?
  3. Supporting vocabulary development
    T: They were all standing quietly. See them, standing quietly? You know be quiet.
    Are they smiling? Are they happy? Not happy. What are they? They are very, very quiet.
    Child: Very, very quiet.
  4. Getting learners to retell the story
    It was a beautiful party. Yes. Now, who wants to tell the whole story? The story of Croc's party.
    Now this story is called The Real Story of the Three Little Pigs. And the wolf is telling the story. What do you think the wolf is going to say?
    So let's write the story together. How shall we start?

Children love stories, and love hearing them again and again. Even young children seem able to cope with quite complex story language in English, maybe because they are familiar with story structure in their own language. They are also used to not understanding everything the first time round, and they do not panic like older learners tend to.

Stories create a shared experience and provide contextual support for the learning of new words and phrases, as well as for subconscious acquisition of grammar. So primary teachers need to be good storytellers, too.

Teachers Learning Classroom Language

Simply studying lists of functions and examples, (as illustrated above), is unlikely to help teachers make great gains in linguistic competence or confidence.

But such lists are useful as an initial stage in syllabus design; we can use them as checklists to ensure overall coverage in a classroom language course. All learners need rich exposure to English, and any course for teachers must provide exposure to English in use in a real classroom context, where these functions occur naturally again and again.

Observing good teachers in action is useful, but video or audio-recorded extracts of English lessons are often more practical because the same lesson extract can be replayed and studied as often as is needed.

Teachers also need opportunities to try out activities in groups, and they will benefit from recording themselves carrying out typical interactions and telling or reading stories. Playing back the recordings, thinking of ways to improve and enrich their language, and then re-recording, provide many learning opportunities.

Trainers Planning Courses

In any training course, time and cost are the usual constraints, so for any group of teachers it is sensible to identify core classroom activities and a small bank of stories they could tell in their lessons. They can then practice handling and exploiting these in English. If trainers use English in the course and encourage teachers to speak English too, even during practical activities like making visual aids or planning and reporting on their activities, this will help their fluency and build their confidence.

The overall goal should be to give teachers the confidence to speak English without being worried about making mistakes. The important thing is to use English fluently and naturally. If teachers can show children that English is a normal means of communication, like their own language, then after a spell children will naturally begin to use it where they can.

If the teacher's underlying attitude to using English is positive, and if it is obvious that the teacher enjoys speaking it, reading it and playing with it, and the teacher encourages and praises pupil's efforts to do the same, then children will develop confidence and be motivated to use English.

Similarly, a positive trainer attitude can work wonders for teachers' motivation and confidence in extending and enriching their own English. This means:

  1. Encouraging teachers to activate and build on whatever English they know already, reinforcing what they do well, rather than focusing on what they don't know.
  2. Taking activities and stories as starting points, discussing them in English, exploring alternative ways to set them up and implement them in class, and then finally looking at the language that can be used to do this.
  3. Speaking English and giving teachers experience not only of traditional classroom interaction but also of narrative, expository talk and spontaneous small group interaction.

Exposure to fluent trainer talk, combined with extracts from real English lessons, can help promote fluent teacher talk in the primary English classroom. And this in turn can give young learners the exposure they need to acquire English naturally.

References

Lightbown, P., & Spada, N. (1999). How languages are learned (Rev. ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Slattery, M., & Willis, J. (2001). English for primary teachers: A handbook of activities and classroom language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Willis, J., & Willis, D. (Eds.). (1996). Challenge and change in language teaching. London: Heinemann ELT.

Notes

1. The language analysis in this paper is based on the data collected from primary English classes for the preparation of the syllabus for English for Primary Teachers: A Handbook of Activities and Classroom Language by Mary Slattery and Jane Willis (2001).



All materials on this site are copyright © by JALT and their respective authors.
For more information on JALT, visit the JALT National Website