Total Physical LanguageTeaching for Young Learners
1137 K. F.
1. Why Teaching English for Children?
Studying a foreign language as a part of international understanding will start in 2002. English will be taught in the general study classes of elementary schools. Languages, including English, should be fundamentally a kind of tool to interact and understand each other. It is worthwhile to learn and use them as tools to live together.
2. What is Total Physical Language Teaching for Children?
Children of Tennoji Kindergarten usually enjoy the instructors' showy gestures, body actions and sign languages. Sometimes they study a part and say it or sing a song, even using finger languages. Younger learners do not hesitate to express themselves using whole body actions. They seem to be more comfortable when they are taught total-physically with actions than without actions, and at the same time it is easier and more comfortable for instructors to teach them total-physically with actions than without actions.
3. Evaluation
How did the Total Physical Language Teaching work for children? How could the differences of age work well on total physical language teaching for children? The classroom experiments to evaluate the differences between Total Physical Language Teaching for Young Learners with actions and without them were carried out in four kindergartens and two elementary schools.
4. Conclusion
Great significant differences can be seen from the results of T-TEST or histograms. This means teaching with actions gives a significant effect to language acquisition, in other words, teaching with actions is much more effective than teaching without actions. In the process of development, children gain various abilities. Development is a spontaneous process that comes from inner maturational growth and children's own effort to make sense of the world. Therefore, instruction to assist children's development is valuable, and pedagogy should be more suitable for children to acquire another language more comfortably.