Ю. О. Котенко

Криворізький державний педагогічний університет

Науковий керівник: викладач Л. Ф. Сорочан

Different methods of teaching alphabet to very young learners

In our today’s world teaching English begins at very young age. At scientific literature children, who are younger seven, are called very young learners. It is very reasonable to start mastering foreign language at this age, because it is a sensitive period (age of a child which is the most prosperous for some activities that develop baby’s skills in them) of learning languages [2: 36]. At this interval of time an infant copes with the mother tongue and a foreign one is excepted like the native. In addition, it is picked up as if it were a game. On one hand, it seems to be easy to teach such learners, because a tutor performs it while a child is playing. On the other hand an instructor should know a lot of techniques to arouse the kid’s interest in studying a language otherwise a very young learner will do next to nothing.

Therefore Carol Read, the author of book "500 Activities for the Primary Classroom" defines some criteria, that every tutor, who teaches children under seven, must know to make own work successful:

1. Very young learners acquire through hearing and experiencing lots of English, in much the same way as they acquire their first language;

2. They learn through doing things and playing; they are not consciously trying to learn new words or phrases – for them this is incidental;

3. They love playing with language sounds, imitating and making funny noises. So they have fun playing with words and phrases, for example, singing them , exaggerating own expressions.

4. Learners of this age are not able to organize their learning. Often they will not even realize that they are learning a foreign language. They simply see it as having fun.

5. Their grammar will develop gradually on its own, provided they hear lots of English and learn to understand a lot of words and phrases [4: 10].

One of the most significant parts of mastering a new language is learning its alphabet. It is important for a preschooler because material about the language sounds and the development of reading and writing skills is based on it, thus, acquiring some grammar aspects is also impossible without the preschool alphabet knowledge [5: 13].

So taking in account all pedagogical principles of giving lessons to children under seven and including importance of this aspect, we offer some non-traditional ways of learning English alphabet.

First of all, we propose to start with learning vowels and then only give infants consonants. The first action is preparing learners to study with a fairy story. For example, “today we are going to a kingdom of letters. There everybody is waiting for our arrival”. The authors of Oxford handbooks for language teachers, Patsy M. Lightbown, Nina Spada, insist on pronouncing some simple words, phrases, like “Hello”, “Good morning”, “I”, “You” in English since the first lessons in order to give confidence to kids, that they are able to understand, and to make them not to be afraid of new activity.

The first vowel letter (A) should be demonstrated simultaneously pronouncing it. A teacher may say to children, that “A” is the petal of a magical flower, which grows in the kingdom, show an empty pattern of a flower with six petals ( there are six vowel letters in English) and stick the first petal with “A”. Some wide used words, that start with letter “A” can be shown and called in English. Children repeat after the teacher in order to learn some words.

Moreover, a tutor can suggest learners to play the game “Our favourite words for today”. The rules are followings: an instructor gives some English words (number depends on the age if they are three or five years) and call them favourite. Most children remember them, because it is psychological technique, in such a way we accentuate their attention with naming the words “favourite”, infants begin loving them.

Tatiana Koty suggests a teacher to learn a rhyme with “A” with preschoolers. For instance:

“One, two, three, four, five,

I am flying in the sky,

I am a toy aeroplane,

My name starts with A!”

Having learnt, children and a tutor fulfill all actions, which are said in the rhyme [3: 6].

At the end a teacher gives a colouring paper with learnt letter and asks to paint this letter in red colour in order to emphasize.

With such a scheme every new letter of the alphabet is mastered.

Speaking about consonant letters, Sue Cowley proposes to make a lazy-tongs, in each circle of which it is drawn a consonant letter. It is certainly necessary to have demonstrable objects, because visual memory is the best developed at the age under seven.

Having mastered all letters a group picks up a song about the alphabet. A good song is sure to catch the attention of young kids. Though there are classic ABC songs, you need to go further by looking for other songs such as ones by Dr. Jean, Jack Hartman and others. These songs focus on letters by including various preschool concepts such as colors, shapes, numbers and more.

The next stage of learning the alphabet is teaching to write and to distinguish block letters from capital ones. These tasks should be given to children not younger than 5 years old, when physiologically they are prepared, their body can coordinate own main movements but slight motions are still not well controlled. So, in this case writing exercises develop coordination of hand’s movements. Nevertheless, we mustn’t overload kids with such tasks. At this stage I.D.Ageeva offers to use rinds of work, where learners must connect points with different letters in the order, in which they are in the alphabet, and get some pictures. For learning to distinguish capital letters from block ones, a tutor may also take suggested method, only writing them in various ways [1: 4-8].

All above mentioned tasks shall allow very young learners to master English alphabet properly. Furthermore, they shall develop children’s memory, imagination some physical skills and the most essential point is, that such kinds of work with infants will make English lessons exciting and unforgettable.