Children’s Bestsellers - Helping Youngsters Learn Foreign Languages
By Sue Copas
Whatever our generation, all of us will doubtless remember popular books from our childhood. These bestsellers, at their core, are all characterised by their ability to hold us captivated with their plot for endless hours, to retain their popularity for several generations and now…to help children learn foreign languages.
The value of using storybooks to pass on educational information and indeed, the value of storytelling as an educational aid has long been recognized by teachers. As a consequence, the use of children’s books as an aid for teaching foreign languages and as an aid for foreign children to learn English has increased greatly in recent years.
The methodology in using this recourse is to create a natural and holistic acquisition-rich environment which can incorporate subsidiary activities arising from the text, and thus engage different learning styles and multiple intelligences. This methodological corpus can and often is, used as a supplement to a teacher’s core materials or can be used to form a sort of stand alone mini-syllabus. Used thus, a story will provide the starting point and structured context for developing a range of related learning activities.
Some of the internationally cited benefits of using children’s literature are:
• They encourage active participation.
• They encourage co-operation between pupils.
• They bring authentic language input into the lessons by teaching natural occurring structures.
• They help in breaking down the language barrier and thus encourage children to use the language being learned.
• They assist children to gain authentic knowledge of the correct usage of grammar by demonstrating naturally occurring linguistic structures.
• They illustrate cross-cultural differences and similarities.
The children are not the only ones to benefit from language teaching based on a foundation of bestselling stories…feedback has shown that the teachers themselves gain a measure of personal and professional development. Implementing a story based methodology involves creativity, classroom management skills and flexibility and the active requirement to exercise these skills enhances abilities thus:
• Fosters the ability to appraise a storybook in very short order and assess its suitability for teaching languages.
• Enhances the ability to create the necessary support material for a storybook and to cross-link it to other areas of the curriculum.
As the benefits of this medium of teaching are becoming ever more established, an ever wider selection of children’s bestsellers are being submitted to agencies for language translation. Here is a small selection of children’s favorites that are already being used for such teaching: The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Little Red Hen and The Pied Piper. With a heavy hitting arsenal of favorites like these, language instruction for youngsters can only benefit.
Sue Copas is the Account Manager of Lingo24 translations agency, a provider of high quality language translation service in UK.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sue_Copas