17.1. Identifying priorities and their implications

For many years, teaching English to children was seen as something additional to the normal curriculum provision of a school system. Increasingly, however, this pattern is changing and in many countries, from Australia to Europe, educators have come to recognise the importance of starting foreign-language learning at an early age. Not only does research emphasise the considerable advantages of early learning, but also the classroom contexts and objectives of the primary school lend themselves very well to active language-learning methods with their focus on task-based and learner-centred learning through communicative teaching within the group. This, of course, characterises the primary school curriculum and its modes of delivery. The primary school English is no more seen as a random collection of interesting and successful play-way tasks. The national syllabus claims to offer teachers a way of constructing a purposeful learning curriculum for children, one that develops their competence in a systematic way, but it fails. Rather, it provides the teacher with almost cut to nothing amount of time (1 academic hour a week in mainstream classes) and a course-book of haphazard activities that fail presenting children even with attractive excitements.

First and foremost, the staged and planned curriculum is all the more important for children because their primary school experiences will set the foundations for their later learning. Secondly, the course-book is not naturally used only in the structured setting of the school. Many children, after all, are being taught very successfully and imaginatively in non-formal contexts with keen and dedicated teachers. They should be offered ways of designing an informal curriculum for their learners so that when learners enter the mainstream of formal education they will have already established the bases for language learning. Besides they should not have lost that innocence, that enthusiasm, which characterises children and which, so much, formal teaching often dispels.

Thus, the activities, included in the curriculum for primary school children, should be organised with different types of learning task in mind, emphasising a range of language skills and modes of learning. To be able to do this a few main things, among others, should be kept in mind while starting the English course in the primary classroom. In the first instance, there should be a great emphasis on learning by doing, echoing here the great theorists, like Pestalozzi, Dewey and Kilpatrick, of practical learning with heart, head and hand. In the second instance, the activities should be structured so that they can easily be chained into a sequence for particular learning groups and at each stage teachers are offered opportunities for action research with their own learners so that they can explore the effects of particular activity choice. This second consideration makes the teacher as a designer of his own practical English course thoroughly investigate three large areas: the natural capacities and instincts children bring to the classroom; attitude goals and content goals; realistic English as the intended product.