This paper reports on pedagogies that promote language, content and literacy in English by stimulating learners’ creativity. The starting point to promote creativity among learners was music and art.There seems to be a natural connection between music, language and thinking which suggests that incorporating musical experiences into daily instruction results in creative thinking. By being exposed to music and art, learners of different ages and from different language contexts developed visualization abilities and invented stories. According to many authors, stories are excellent vehicles for teaching and learning because they contain all the ingredients from which learners can benefit. The learners in this study moved from listening to music, to the word and sentence levels, to finally telling their stories in English, and the stories the learners created proved to be a vehicle for internalizing language and for literacy development.
Interactive shared picturebook reading with learners of different ages and levels has proven to be a prominent practice in all languages. The overall aim of the chapter is to explore the applicability of shared picturebook reading to teach English as a foreign language. Due to the affordances of the multimodality of picturebooks to develop language and content knowledge, this critical investigation seeks to integrate shared picturebook reading as a mode of instruction into the young learners' academic curriculum to promote oral language abilities and conceptual knowledge. In order to provide practical advice for educators of young learners, the chapter describes ways that picturebooks boost vocabulary, language learning, and conceptual knowledge in English L2. The chapter develops criteria to select picturebooks for subject-area instruction, paying attention to the picture-word dynamics.
Este artículo centra su atención en el perfil, percepciones y metodologías de los docentes de lenguas extranjeras en Educación Infantil en la Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid. Con información de la normativa vigente y con datos de un estudio llevado a cabo en centros públicos y privados, el artículo analiza las metodologías, las percepciones y las distintas modalidades de perfil del profesorado, y reflexiona sobre la necesidad de replantear el sistema de formación para adaptarlo a los requerimientos de la realidad educativa actual de enseñanza bilingüe. Las conclusiones e implicaciones se centran en un conjunto de reflexiones para adecuar las metodologías y el papel del docente en formación inicial y permanente a la política educativa de implantación del aprendizaje temprano de lengua extranjera en la región.
The purpose of this research-to-practice paper is to delve deeper into the rich potential of picturebooks for eliciting children’s spontaneous speech production during face-to-face conversational interaction. Specifically, it analyses how children apply their existing communicative skills during exposure to the non-textual elements of picturebooks. This in turn enables to get wider understanding of how children learn and use English L2 at an early bilingual immersion school. The study examines the oral narrative production of Spanish-speaking English learners in an early bilingual immersion school. The analytical framework of the study is influenced by studies in the field of child language acquisition. The data are drawn from a 2.5 years longitudinal study of four children (aged 4-5 years at the first recording) from four different classrooms. The conversational interactions created by looking and talking about picturebook illustrations were audio-recorded and the utterances obtained through spontaneous elicitation were transcribed and analysed for emerging syntactic production and for communication strategies. Data analysis provides information on spontaneous oral created language which reflects children’s underlying linguistic competence influenced partly by the learning setting, by the type of input and by the amount of exposure time. Research findings reveal how children use illustrations as a language scaffold and how the English oral language skills develop over time for syntactic development. These findings suggest that picturebooks and even more, picturebook illustrations are ideal tools to elicit oral language from children as well as to support natural acquisition of language. Based on the research findings of this study and on observation of how picturebooks lend themselves to build children’s existing communicative skills, the paper provides several hints to maximize communicative interaction in the young learner’s classroom.
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