Teaching Modern Languages in the Primary School

Patricia Driscoll, David Frost, Patricia Driscoll, David Frost

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134670840
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

It has been argued for some time that to improve language learning in Britain we need to start earlier, as many other European countries do. This book is addressed to policy makers and teachers who are considering the possibility of getting involved in the teaching of MFL in the primary school.

II
Classroom issues

4
The four language skills
The whole works!

Alison Hurrell

Understanding

Two children are sitting side by side in the classroom working on number. A pile of buttons is on the table in front of them and each has an old tobacco tin with five glittering stars and the number five on the lid. The following conversation ensues between one of them and a French-speaking visitor:

Visitor: Alors, tu regardes bien les étoiles sur la boîte. Il faut trouver 5 boutons et les mettre dans la boîte. Tu comprends? Si tu veux, on peut les compter ensemble.

Child: One two…three…four…five.

Visitor: Un…deux…trois…quatre…cinq.

Visitor: Voilà très bien…bravo!

The child, with obvious pleasure and a sense of mathematical achievement, punches the air, puts the lid on his box (which now contains the magical five buttons), turns to his friend and says: ‘You’ve to count out five buttons she read what was on the lid…and put them in the box.’ The second child does so and equally triumphantly places the lid on his tobacco box. At this point, visitor and friend lean forward simultaneously to congratulate the child. I am beaten to it. The friend says, confidently, fluently, with neither inhibition nor any sense of linguistic incongruity, ‘très bien…bravo!’ Both children are five years old.

Later that morning, after a presumably boisterous playground game, the same child returns to his seat with a grazed knee and a tear-stained face. The visitor points to the child’s knee and says sympathetically:

Visitor: Oh là là, tu t’es fait mal au genou? Qu’est-ce qu’il s’est passé?

Child: I fell.

Visitor: Tu veux un pansement?

Child: Uh huh. Mrs….keeps them in her drawer.

The sore knee is bandaged, the face cleaned, and work resumes.

We might be amazed at this exchange for at least two reasons: because of the child’s ability to understand, and interpret for someone else, a flow of foreign language; and because of his desire and ability to reproduce some of that flow in his own interaction with his classmate.

Does this incident illustrate that he understood the foreign language in the sense which we normally mean, that of understanding lexis, sentence structure, discourse features? Or was he rather demonstrating that the interaction fitted in with complete appropriateness to the patterns of many interactions? Both he and I understood the situation in the sense that we understood one another’s intentions. Language was to a large extent unnecessary and its meaning was highly predictable in the human context of its occurrence. What I meant was clear. What the words meant could, in principle, be derived from that. It was possible for him to figure out what the words meant because they occurred together with and were embedded within certain non-linguistic events—the sympathetic look, the obvious question in the context of his distress, the obvious solution in the context of his wound.

In Margaret Donaldson’s words ‘It is the child’s ability to interpret situations which makes it possible for him, through active processes of hypothesis-testing and inference, to arrive at a knowledge of the language used.’ Children are able to learn language—first and second language— ‘precisely because they possess certain skills and have a relatively well-developed capacity for making sense of certain types of situation involving direct and immediate human interaction’ (Donaldson, 1978:37). When a child hears words that refer to a situation which they are at the same time perceiving, their interpretation of the words is influenced by the expectations which they bring to the situation. The child knows that language exists to convey meaning and they are actively engaged in a constant process of constructing meaning, making sense of things and of what people do. This includes what people say. However, there is a considerable distance, and therefore there can be a considerable period of time, between an understanding of the words embedded in a meaningful context, and a separate understanding of those words in other contexts or in isolation.

In the classroom, in the context of foreign language learning, we scaffold the child’s understanding of the flow of foreign language—we try to make things easier for the learner so that we might engage in and sustain communication with the learner in the classroom. As well as creating contexts which will provide strong clues as to the meaning of the words within them, we may adopt certain characteristics of what has been described as ‘motherese’ or ‘foreigner-talk’:

• exaggerated changes of pitch;

• louder volume;

• ‘simpler’ grammar;

• a focus on discrete lexis for example, through the use of flash cards, realia, pointing to the article as we talk about it;

• facial expression;

• mime, gesture.

These scaffolding techniques we believe will support the child’s foreign language acquisition in the classroom context. However, when a child interprets what we say, their interpretation is influenced by at least three things and the ways in which these interact with each other—their knowledge of the language; their assessment of what we intend (as indicated by our non-linguistic behaviour); and the manner in which they would represent the physical situation to themselves if we were not there at all. These points are made clearly in Margaret Donaldson’s seminal work Children’s Minds (1978). As a young learner of the foreign language the child’s foreign language (FL) resource will always be less than that of the teacher and they will give more weight to nonlinguistic cues—for example, in teaching terms, to flash cards, visual props, other actions, etc. In addition, they will bring their knowledge of the world and how it works to their active listening and hypothesis-testing. When these are in harmony, a holistic understanding is achieved.

The child tries to ‘juggle’ all kinds of knowledge and levels of language. When learning, one of these areas can ‘take over’; in some cases this will lead to ‘error’. If unnoticed, this ‘error’ can destroy the ‘juggling act’, and consequently the child’s comprehension. If this occurs commonly, the learner may lose motivation, or believe that language learning is a meaningless activity, with little human sense.

I was telling the story of the little elephant (based loosely on the Rudyard Kipling story) to a class of 10 year-olds. The various animals in the story were introduced—le petit elephant, la girafe, le lion, le singe, le serpent, le crocodile— and the children seemed to be following the storyline, evidenced by group chorusing of key repeated structures and phrases, accompanying hand gestures, smiles, and so forth. At the end of the story, one perplexed child asked why all the animals had been phoning each other. It took me some time to realise that for her, le petit elephant had been understood as le petit telephone, and her construction of the story thereafter had been based on that initial misunderstanding. All teachers should take note and beware!

The introduction and development of the four language skills

It is only recently that teachers have started to pay substantial attention to how their pupils learn a foreign language. It is well known that since the late 1970s enormous efforts have been made to develop a more communicative approach in schools (Littlewood, 1981), where the language is used creatively for real communication, for real purposes, authentic rather than contrived language, or language used because it exemplifies certain structures. Communication is usually embedded in meaningful contexts, where there are genuine exchanges of information. Children are encouraged to choose for themselves what to say or write; they are enabled to cope with the unpredictable, and develop repair strategies when communication breaks down. But how do young learners reach this stage of communicative competence? What do they bring to their foreign language learning? As stated before, they bring their knowledge of the functions of language, how it works, how it can be built up and they know there is still a lot to be learned. Very often their capacity for acquiring some aspects of the system of rules and strategies underlying communicative language use is intuitive rather than explicit. There can no longer be any doubt that children can assimilate the sound system of a new language and can absorb, reproduce and imaginatively enact quite large chunks of that language without necessarily being able to analyse what it is they have absorbed. An early start to foreign language learning allows for this kind of intuitive knowledge but can, in my experience, be accompanied at times by a more analytical approach, which will enable the children to make more specific links between the FL and their knowledge of L1, building on their concepts about language in particular and on concepts of the world they already possess or that they are learning at school. The foreign language can be overlaid onto these existing concepts, thereby promoting a holistic approach to learning. The grafting of an analytical style is one of the major problems for the teacher. Well handled, it works—but unless the individual child can make the connection, it leads to confusion and disenchantment.

For the class teacher with responsibility for delivering the foreign language, questions will arise as to how to teach listening, speaking, reading and writing. I would now like to consider the strategies which we can employ to introduce and develop each of the four language skills. Promoting the four communication skills independently in this way is no contradiction to a holistic approach. All the skills are to some extent interwoven and can very rarely be totally separated and they all involve both social and cognitive processes. On the other hand, to distinguish between them may facilitate an organised presentation and discussion. Most language learning activities currently have as their main focus one of the skills.

Listening

Listening is frequently called a receptive skill but the term is misleading. Most listening requires a readiness and an active co-operation on the part of the listener. It requires understanding, interpreting and building. It is the skill which the child acquires first in their foreign language learning. A characteristic of the spoken word is its lack of permanence: once something has been said and listened to, it disappears. We are not talking here of pre-recorded text which the child can listen to again and again, but of the most frequent listening input at this stage—the class teacher. What are the implications for the child and for the teacher?

Initially the child will be trying to segment the stream of strange sounds into constituent units and to relate these to the situational context of the utterance so that the whole makes sense. Of course we are helping the child access this flow by the vast repertoire of support mechanisms at our disposal—facial expression, gesture, mime—and most importantly by giving the child time to hear, to assimilate, to reflect and to respond where they feel this is appropriate. In early foreign language learning we often lean too heavily on the stimulus-response variety of input even at the earliest stages of the teaching programme. In the area of personal information we ask the child their name, their age, where they live, how old they are, etc. and we look for an immediate response. Paradoxically for many children, this is not appropriate or effective. They have the ‘right to silence’, the pupil’s right to the Fifth Amendment, as it were, and we should not be troubled by this since they may be actively manifesting their understanding in other ways—or not: they will line up when asked to do so, they will fetch the scissors and cut out their animal masks when directed to do so, they will smile at the FL jokes, they will show their pleasure during storytelling, but they may not wish to commit themselves to speech at that stage in their FL learning. Premature insistence on a spoken response can lead to stress, an unwillingness to take risks, ‘failure’. This relates well to Cambourne’s ‘responsibility’, where the child chooses what to pay attention to, and where we provide the scaffold, but do not insist on its use, or its means of use. Initial scaffolding ensures no failure (Cambourne, 1988).

Frequently different learning styles and/or preferences come into play. Not all learners are aural learners. For them (and this includes some adults as well) the written word is not a peripheral support but an integral, essential part of the learning process. The written word assists in the segmentation of sound, word, phrase and we should not allow ourselves to deny the child this support on the basis of the oft-quoted belief that they will mispronounce words with which they are not already familiar. This is self-evident and occurs in the child’s reading of L1 as well. We have rather to grasp the nettle and provide the child with the means to decode the written word. I can illustrate this by using an example from recent experience. During one particular game with young learners, in order to avoid any physical harm, I said: ‘Attention, les enfants! Ne vous bousculez pas… ça peut être dangereux!’ This was accompanied by gesture, mime, exaggerated stress on the word dangereux, in my mind a word which would be readily accessible to most children of that age on the basis that it sounded like the English word dangerous. They did not understand. I started to write the word on the blackboard d-a-n-g-e…and at that point, a chorus of recognition...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• I. Policy and Rationale
• II. Classroom Issues
• III. Future Development
• Appendix I
• Appendix II