Teaching Primary
Aged Students

Education

What and Why?

At this age, whether pupils are learning English in school alongside other curriculum subjects or in a language institution after school, learning a foreign language is part of their education. Pupils bring expectations and experience of learning to English language lessons. The activities of the language lesson are well suited to developing skills which can be used across their education, such as learning to work in groups, finding out information, evaluating progress, reflecting on ways of working, comparing, using imagination and asking questions. The topic-based content of the units expects and encourages pupils to draw on information from other subject-based areas and to combine the information in different ways using the new structures and vocabulary of English. This serves to make the lessons both memorable and motivating.

Practical ideas

• Encourage the pupils to ask questions about the topic and not merely to answer them.
• Help pupils think of ways to find out more information and research a topic to find answers.
• Encourage pupils to use a range of reference materials, for example, encyclopaedias, maps, atlases, CD-Roms, websites and the library.
• Encourage pupils to become individual 'experts' in a particular area of the topic and to share their knowledge with the class.
• If you teach other subjects to the same class, try to use some of the English from English lessons in, for example, the History lessons.