R-stands for Rebus

 Working with my group of young teachers has certainly been a great source of inspiration to write entries for this blog.  We've recently been exploring ways to supplement English language materials through the use and adaptation of stories, poems, games, chants, songs, and evidently, using online tools and apps.

One of the suggestions was to include rebus in poems and stories. A rebus is a written text that includes words and pictures. They're described as "deep in thought" as they foster cognitive development which is the way in which we understand or make sense of the 🌎 around us. How we learn, acquire, develop and use the language to express 💡 and 💭. 

Using pictures to represent words dates back to Egypt and its hieroglyphics and the Chinese pictographs. However, it wasn't until the 1500's that a particular format of picture writing was invented in France. It was called rebus and they became very popular in Europe. In fact, Lewis Carroll author of "Alice in Wonderland" was passionate about rebus. 

Rebus can make reading fun, entertaining, and help children develop reading and writing skills as well. 

Here's an example of what a rebus story would look like using Google slides and the emoji keyboard. You can share the slides with your students through the school LMS and ask them to complete the story or write their own. It is worth giving it a try. I'm pretty sure your student will love to interact with those popular characters they find everywhere nowadays. 

If you found this post useful, please leave a comment 👇

source: https://kottke.org/tag/Lewis%20Carroll

source: https://www.scribd.com/document/233884544/Rebus-an-Effective-Teaching-Tool

P-stands for Poetry in the EFL classroom

 It is no secret that most EFL students struggle with grammar, and this is a relevant issue when planning my lessons. In many cases, the problem lies in the student's motivation. Currently,  my B1 learners have been working with adverbs of manner and I came across some exceptional ideas. One of them, I actually put into practice, was having my students write short poems using adverbials of manner. Khansir (2012) suggests that poetry can be used to develop learners’ knowledge of English and to teach structure, grammar, and vocabulary. Moreover, poetry can foster students' motivation to read and write in order to achieve academic proficiency (Antika, 2016). 

The main aim of this approach was to motivate the learners. Hence, I provided them with some tasks in the flipped classroom so they could learn about the use and form of adverbials. Later, during the online session, they completed a fill-in-the-blanks activity with a wonderful and romantic song exclusively composed for the topic of adverbs by an ingenious ESL teacher AlanSmithRobertson👏. Once the grammar was contextualized, the learners discussed how adverbs are used to add depth and emotion to sentences and writing tasks. At this point, the learners were introduced to the idea of including adverbs in poems 🙌. I shared with my students a Padlet where they could find an extraordinary tutorial and some examples of adverb poems - one written by me in honor of the Ukrainian people- 💗. I invite you to take a look at my students' work and leave your opinion in the comments.👇

Antika, R. (2016). Poetry in EFL Classroom. TELL-US JOURNAL, 2 (2).

Khansir, A.A. (2012). Teaching Poetry in the ELT Classroom. International Review of Social Sciences and Humanities, 3 (1). 

C- stands for Cognitive Needs

This week I had the fortune to meet a group of young English teachers preparing for their Young Learners Certification. In a discussion moment about young learners' physical, emotional, and cognitive needs, several interesting points were brought up by these young practitioners. One of their main concerns was to fulfill the cognitive needs of their pupils since they reckon this area of paramount importance. The field of teaching English to young learners has expanded enormously in the last ten years. However,  Cameron (2001) suggests that implications for teaching young learners need to be addressed from beyond the classroom and children should be considered as active learners. In her paper, Cameron highlights key ideas from Piaget's and Vygotsky's work that can provide information about how we think of children as language learners. Although Piaget gives less importance to the role of language in cognitive development than does Vygotsky, we ought to acknowledge that Piaget's argumentation of the limited capacity of children as sense-makers of other people's actions and language is key to understanding how they respond to the tasks and activities we plan in the language classroom. On the other hand, Vygotsky posits that language provides children with a new tool for doing things and for organising information. But he also states that adults play an important role in helping children learn by reading them stories, asking them questions, and talking to them while they are playing. We can conclude then, that as adults and as teachers of young learners, we must make the world accessible to them since "the ability to learn through instruction and mediation is characteristic of human intelligence" (Cameron, 2001, p 6).

Some ways in which we can cater to the children's cognitive needs is by providing them with plenty of opportunities to develop numeracy and literacy skills.  And by giving them activities to think abstractly. In the following link, you will find an extraordinary work by Herbert Puchta "Developing thinking skills in the young learner' classroom" 💡.  I hope you find it useful to cope with the challenges of the 21st- Century language classroom. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lB8R6PsiTydX5xHNzF7znXKzFeFbSoOB/view?usp=sharing

Reference:

Cameron, L. (2001). Children learning a foreign language. Teaching Languages to Young Learners, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511733109.002