Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Language Content
But what topics should be the basis of the games and
activities of the primary classroom? What centres of interest
are commonest in children between 5 and 11? At the younger
end of the primary spectrum, the most attractive items are
those with potential rather than intrinsic interest. It is what
the child can do with a thing, rather than what it is, which
matters. Things to hold, drop, throw or carry, things to build
with, to colour, to wear, to give and take, to hide and find are
what matter when the child is growing experimentally in
relationship to his environment. The activity is all important,
though bright colours, manageable size and sympathetic
textures are compelling. This being so, the earliest choice of
objects to be named should be portable (balls, balloons and
bags) wearable (coats, hats and shoes) and manipulative
(bricks, dolls, and small items of furniture). Gradually the
vocabulary of the immediate natural surroundings can be
built up—the familiar lexis of home, toy cupboard, family, of
streets and shops and play. The need to name things is best
harnessed by learning lexical sets—parts of the body, clothes,
furniture, food, toys and animals and so on—and the
manipulative appeal may be supplied by simple drawing and
colouring activities followed up by games which use these
objects—real or represented—as tokens for touching,
collecting, finding, counting or constructing, as appropriate.
The natural developmental patterns of the primary school
child, then, suggesting an initial concern for naming things—
nouns—and identifying where things are—prepositions—
and doing things to things—verbs—opens up the world of

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action and role-playing. Giving, and taking and holding
grows into helping in the house; collecting and carrying
becomes shopping; playing with clothes develops into getting
ready to go out and the putting and taking, the pushing and
pulling, the hiding and finding crystallise into the simulated
activities of parents, animals and work-people of the familiar
world. The sex-role stereotyping of the maturing young
child—little girls are by nature more interested in dolls and
kitchens, little boys are more interested in boats and trains
and lorries is something to be exploited in the language
activities, rather than shaped by the sociologically zealous
teacher. Whatever is a natural topic in the mother tongue is a
suitable topic for English.
The introduction of reading and writing in English should
not take place until a fluent oral foundation has been
established and, in foreign language situations, not until the
children are familiar with the printed word in the mother
tongue. Indeed, many teachers of primary English, using
activity methods, prefer to withhold reading and writing for
up to two years. Such concentration on spoken English pays
dividends in fluency, pronunciation and the natural use of
English, but demands considerable expertise from the teacher.
It is true that once children can read and write English their
language practice and experience is no longer totally reliant
upon the teacher as a model and initiator. It is also true that in
the more formal systems of primary education, and those
second language situations where English is being developed
as an academic instrument, the printed word is properly
introduced at about the end of the first year of study. But in
any case, reading, and later writing, are best woven gradually
into the fabric of an oral/activity methodology.
There can be no doubt that primary school children can
and do learn English with remarkable ease, enthusiasm and
naturalness. Perhaps the saddest aspect of the FLES
movement has been the problem of continuity; for unless the
early learning of English is designed and functions as part of
a process which continues unbroken in secondary schooling
the sense of frustration in both children and teachers is
considerable. It is basically for this reason that French in
British primary schools has proved disappointing, and that
the English teaching in French primary schools has been

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discouraged. On the other hand, where English is taught in a
co-ordinated and unbroken sequence from primary through
secondary education, and where the language teaching is
vigorously non-selective, as in Sweden and Malta for
instance, the results are a very high percentage of the
population who are bilingual. It need hardly be added that in
scores of private schools in many countries where children
learn English from the age of 6 or 7, and continue in the same
establishment for their whole school career, standards of
spoken and written English tend to be most impressive. The
reason lies not in the selective nature of these schools, in
superior teaching methods or smaller classes, but in the
unbroken sequence of teaching English which (it is taken for
granted) every child can and does learn for both instrumental
and integrative purposes.
The degrees of proficiency in the different languages of a
multi-lingual speaker vary. That is to say, it is not uncommon
for a foreign learner to have a lesser competence in speaking
English than in reading and writing it. This often proves to be
the case where English has been taught indirectly by
translation from the mother tongue, or where the teaching
has been book-centred—foreigners who ‘speak written
English’ are all too common. Perhaps one great advantage of
an early start to learning English is that this danger is
avoided: the young learner, unhampered by folk-myths about
foreign languages, is put into the position of thinking in
English from the very start far more readily than the older
beginner. What is more, the foreign language grows with him
as an active part of his thinking and talking, and having first
encountered English in its oral form he is never likely to
regard the spoken word as inferior to print.