Young Learners

Teaching English to Elementary School Children

Recently I was talking to an elementary school teacher who has a sixth grade class. This year a Japanese ALT comes to teach English to the class. The form teacher said that her students felt frustrated because they were learning only vocabulary. They wanted to learn English they could actually use if they met an English speaker. On a recent school trip to the Peace Park in Hiroshima they saw lots of non-Japanese people and were telling their teacher they wanted to speak to them. Unfortunately they didn’t have the English do this. Knowing a list of fruit or animal names in English wasn’t appropriate for this situation.

Of course it is necessary to teach vocabulary. But students need some useful questions too for those occasions when they may actually be able to use English outside the classroom in a real-life situation. The obvious question is probably Where are you from? Subsequent questions that are useful probably depend on the individual student but we can at least teach them some versatile questions that they can ask.

I think two of the best questions to teach are, Do you like ....? and What ....... do you like? This gives great scope if they meet an English speaker. Do you like Japan? Do you like Hiroshima? Do you like sushi? Do you like okonomiyaki? Do you like baseball? What Japanese food do you like? What baseball team do you like? What sport do you like? and so on.

Luckily for us as teachers, these questions are great fun to practise in class. The easiest way to do this is for the teacher to ask a few of the stronger students questions using the target pattern, and help them to answer. Then have a few students ask other students while the whole class is listening. Then put them into pairs and tell them to ask each other ten questions. They usually get so involved in this that they don’t stop after ten. The patterns are fairly easy so usually most students stick to using English and don’t lapse into Japanese. An alternative activity is to have a time limit - about 3 minutes for 20 students is about right. All students stand up, and have to ask one question to the teacher. After they have asked a question, they sit down. They must all be sitting down by the end of the time limit. All the questions should be different. This activity doesn’t use time as effectively as the first one but it is fun and they enjoy asking questions to the teacher. These questions can also be incorporated in a role-play mingling activity (see below).

One thing to bear in mind about these questions is that they don’t lend themselves to topic-based lessons. Definitely, What ..... do you like? would be difficult to practise in a topic-based lesson. Do you like ....? could be practised but would soon become boring. They are much better suited to pattern-based lessons, where students can use any topic they wish within that pattern.

To practise Where are you from? needs a bit more work from the teacher. This question can’t be practised in such a simple way because it isn’t versatile like the above questions. One way to introduce the question is to have some stick people drawn on the board with flags of various countries. Ask the students Where's he/she from? Then ask a few students where they are from. Then hand out character cards to each student. Mine are about playing card size. They have a name, an age and a country plus that country’s flag in colour. Each student takes on a new identity. They mingle, find a partner, and ask their name, their age, where they are from, plus any other questions they have time for (Do you like ....? and What .... do you like? can be practised). On a signal from the teacher, all students find a new partner and repeat. This can continue until the teacher stops the activity.

Doing the above activities from time to time will ensure that when students have an opportunity to speak to an English speaker in a real-life situation, they will have the language necessary to have a reasonable conversation.

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