PLAYWAY TO ENGLISH -
a new four-level course for young learners

Getting to know Playway to English is a chain of surprises. The first striking feature of the course is that it is not a book or even a set of books. At each level, it is a big box of various materials among which you will find the following:

§ a pupil’s book in colour full of stickers for reconstructing the stories;

§ a video cassette with puppet sketches, cartoon stories and animated cartoons;

§ an activity book similar in a way to a workbook but for younger learners;

§ an audio-cassette or CD which can be used together with or instead of the video;

§ a set of picture cards for introducing and practicing vocabulary;

§ a set of story cards for presenting and developing the stories;

§ an audio cassette or CD of songs, chants and rhymes connected with other components;

§ a teacher’s guide which makes the course easy to teach even if you are only beginning your teaching
                                career or have never taught students so young;

§ Max, the glove puppet – for fun and facilitating children’s interaction in English.

When I first opened the box I almost felt frustration. About fifteen years ago, I started teaching young learners in a children’s club, where their parents brought them after a day spent in a nursery or primary school, hoping that I would miraculously make them speak English. The task would have been difficult to solve if I had followed school programmes and used the inauthentic text-books available in those days: resistance of the children to school-type activities was immense. Instead, I followed my intuition and bought all Soviet-made board games for children in English, picture notebooks for colouring, and a lot of colour pencils; cut out nice and funny pictures wherever I could find them, and brought a box of toys from home. The next step was to invent various games that would allow me to hit two birds with one stone: teach English and let the learners have fun. Eight-years experience showed that I was right: the course was very popular, and later, when I met some of the parents, they told me that the children’s love for English and the right feeling of it, together with sound knowledge of basic grammar and vocabulary, helped them a lot at school, and they invariably were among the best in classes. Now why frustration?

My home-made materials, which I still keep somewhere in the closet, compared to Playway to English, look like a hand-made bicycle assembled by somebody’s father out of hardly- fitting parts found in the garbage. However, even more frustrating was watching the video with all those puppet sketches, stories and songs – neither I, nor my pupils, could even dream of such a video at the time. The frustration turned to the past is the worst type of frustration – nothing can be changed about our professional isolation from the rest of ELT world in those years. Nevertheless, I realise that nothing like Playway to English was available to the teachers of young learners even in Britain in the mid- 80’s. Our area of professional expertise, like any other, is constantly developing, bringing together the new achievements of educational psychology and ELT methodology, the experiences of the international ELT community, and the expectations of today’s pupils and their parents. In this way, Playway to English is unique even among the latest published materials that are specially written for children of 4 to 9 years of age.

The course has been developed using the so-called SMILE approach, which is based on the following fundamental elements:

M Multi-sensory learner motivation

I Intelligence-building activities

L Long-term memory storage of the language through music, movement, rhythm and rhyme

E Exciting sketches, stories and games

The SMILE approach elaborates on key concepts of cognitive psychology and the principles of teaching very young learners. According to these principles:

§ children are able to learn a foreign language at a very early stage of their development;

§ children can best be taught through games and fantasy;

§ children develop their cognitive skills through language learning;

§ children are able not only to think but also to think about their thinking.

There are several types of intelligence that are developed in children through working with Playway to English:

1) verbal-linguistic (all the activities of the course);

2) visual-spatial (drawing, completing, colouring and matching pictures, putting puzzles together, finding objects “hidden” in a picture, watching the video, etc.);

3) logical-mathematical (various types of matching exercises, solving puzzles, counting objects in the pictures);

4) kinesthetic (action stories and games, role-play, cutting and pasting pictures, rearranging cards, etc.);

5) intrapersonal (various silent exercises, listening tasks, rearranging and reconstructing stories, etc.);

6) interpersonal (various interactive exercises, role-play, singing together);

7) rhythmical-musical (listening to, learning and reproducing chants, songs and rhymes).

Every activity is integrated – it aims at several skills at once. Concrete examples of the exercises that I like very much are as follows (you can compare them with the list of cognitive skills listed above and find out which of the skills each exercise is aimed at):

ь the children look for hidden objects in a picture, find and name them, then count them
                                (work in pairs);

ь after watching the video, the children reconstruct the story by sticking pictures into the
                                Pupil’s Book in the correct sequence (silent activity);

ь while listening to songs, chants and rhymes (the difference between the three is explained
                                in the Teacher’s Book), the children point to corresponding pictures in the Pupil’s Book (silent activity);

ь the children look at the pictures and name the object that do not belong (work in pairs);

ь after watching a cartoon story from the video, the children complete a puzzle from the
                                 pieces that are at the back of the Pupil’s Book;

ь after listening to an action story from the audio cassette, the children arrange the pictures
                                 in the correct order to reconstruct the story.

These and similar exercises are a basis for memorising and further reproduction of single words, word combinations, as well as action stories, chants, songs and rhymes. In levels 1 and 2, the course does not teach writing, relying on illustrations to support memory. Since levels 1 and 2 are recommended for children aged 4 to 6, it is only natural that they will learn the English alphabet later, at levels 3 and 4.

At this point, I cannot help recollecting my negative encounters with some of our methods of teaching English to pre-school learners. Last year, I was escorting a British ELT man to a Moscow school run on a commercial basis, where we attended a class of English with six-year olds. The teacher asked a boy to write a few words on the blackboard. When the boy misplaced the apostrophe in the word pupils’ (having written pupil’s instead) the teacher angrily reprimanded him in front of the class and the visitors, using the notions of Singular and Plural in Russian for explaining her demand. The Englishman was shocked, and kept asking me afterwards what might be the reason for such an approach to teaching young learners. He also asked if this incident was typical, and I really did not know what to say. I knew about very positive results obtained by the Russian members of the Young Learners Special Interest Group led by Natalia Achkasova in the British Council. I knew that Natalia’s candidate thesis had been devoted to teaching young learners through music and I had attended a couple of her workshops, but I knew nothing about our numerous commercial groups of English that had been mushrooming all over the country’s kindergartens since the mid 90’s. I wonder what the situation really is, and will be grateful to the readers if they share their own experience, as teachers or parents, with Alyona Gromushkina, the Editor of “ENGLISH”, and me.

I am very far from blaming the Russian teachers for not using more enjoyable methods in teaching pre-school learners – this area of ELT has been even more disadvantaged in Russia up until quite recently. However, I am calling the readers’ attention to our lagging behind in this sensitive area, particularly in view of the new series of international examinations – Cambridge Young Learners English Tests. According to some forecasts, these exams may soon become particularly popular with those parents who pay for their children’s English classes and want to see the results.

I suggest that we should open a discussion on the pages of this newspaper, a kind of forum, where teachers from all over Russia could share their views and experiences, contributing to the pool of ideas concerning young learners’ education. Don’t be shy, however small your contribution might be. If you do not want your opinion to be published, just write to the Editor about your problems. If you send your address we will include you in our database and will do our best in trying to answer your questions through the newspaper or even mailing some methodology materials to you personally. Don’t forget to mention your name and address, indicate the age of the children you are teaching, the materials you are using and the most frequent problems that arise.

If you live in Moscow or near it, you may attend a seminar by Natalia Achkasova, specially devoted to teaching young learners. The seminar will be held in DINTERNAL on September 9 at 4:00 p.m. It is at 2/3 Khlebny pereulok, above the Bookstore “ANGLIA”. Contact telephones are: 203-4403, 202-4066.

By Ludmila Gorodetskaya,

Moscow State University,

Faculty of Foreign Languages