Cooperative Language Learning Activities with Young Learners

Abstract

Educational Testing Services (ETS) started an English test for elementary school students called 'TOEFL Primary' focusing on reading, listening and speaking skills in 2013 (Jung, 2013). It is not difficult to find banners of private English institutes in Korea promoting how well their elementary students are performing on these tests. These days in Korea, children usually start to learn English from kindergarten. In kindergarten, they learn English with storybooks, songs and a lot of activities in oral forms because young learners' teachers tend to think reading is difficult (Dlugosz, 2000). The children who learn English mainly via speaking, and then have to take the TOFEL Junior test, have to be able to read texts, understand passages as well as comprehend listening texts and speak at sentence levels. In the kindergarten where I work, 7 year old children can pronounce words and succeed in phonics classes by the time they graduate the kindergarten. The children can recognize some language in some storybooks, without the help of a teacher, but they struggle with meaning and following the narrative of a storybook. This Textbook is designed for students experiencing the problems mentioned above: those who are at an in-between stage of phonics and sentence level work in reading and speaking. The group of students I seek to address is Korean elementary 1st grade students who have been trained mainly in phonics. Their proficiency level is Level 1 Entering according to WIDA. They can read and write simple words and sentences with long vowels, consonant digraphs in single syllable words. This Textbook focuses on learning meaning of both vocabulary and sentence patterns in a young learner-friendly manner that uses repetitive storybooks. Students will enjoy practicing all 4 skills in this Book through its various group activities along with fun and easy final writing tasks related to the repeated patterns of the storybooks. Students should also be better prepared for the test they have to take after studying with this Textbook.