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Hi, my name is Silvia Sánchez Calderón and I'm part of the
teaching team of Didáctica de la Comunicación Escrita en Inglés.
This module belongs to the fourth year
of the degree of Infant Education.
In this part one, we're going to focus on
the use of literature as a didactic strategy
in the teaching and learning process of written
production English and its application in the classroom.
We're going to talk about the use of
tales as a didactic learning resource.
Tales are a powerful source of information because
they bridge the gap between the kid's reality
and the kid's own imagination while learning the foreign language.
Tales also promote spontaneous speech and they develop creativity
and working through role-playing while taking part of the story.
Tales use orality and also repetitive structures that both
contribute to the development of the children's working memory.
Tales motivate and also promote these positive
attitudes towards learning the foreign language.
When listening to tales or when reading tales, children learn about both
aspects, the linguistic part, but also the culture of the target language.
Tales also allow the development of interaction skills,
social skills and building emotional confidence.
And this is the case because the child
can share his or her own past experience.
Tales also shape behavior and allow resolution
of conflicts that may happen in the real life.
Tales can also be used in the classroom for internalizing
the foreign language linguistic structures used in context.
The visual aids, the visual support that tales include and also the
orality and also the previous knowledge that children depart from
will promote this motivation for learning the foreign language.
Tales are used as a learning game. As for this approach, the
New Games Foundation put forward by Steffens and Gorin in 2001,
teachers can design a sequence of fun and creative activities that
allow the development of meaningful learning and constructive learning.
This will allow children to resolve conflicts, personal conflicts,
social conflicts or social differences in their daily lives
and learn about how to communicate in the foreign language.
As mentioned earlier, tales motivate and teachers can design
tale-oriented games that allow working with rules, symbols,
different types of actions, thoughts, opinions that will add this value to
this mixture of reality and imagination involved and conveyed in the tale plot.
Tales also allow acquiring the foreign language in terms of linguistic
structures and this can be worked in the classroom by working through games.
These games will allow interacting and communicating between the teacher and the child
but also at home between parents and children when reading and listening to the tale.
There are other aspects that also promote language learning
through tales and this involves the listening comprehension skills,
so the reading skills, working with the five
senses by manipulating objects, by mimicking,
and all this should be carefully designed by the teacher in terms of the
activities implemented in the classroom to cater for the students' learning needs.
Tales also show a moral message and this message is related to
the child's own reality in terms of social issues, family issues,
and here's an example of a tale, Cinderella, that teaches
how to have a decent life and get love from others.
So this is the underlying message of this tale.
In terms of the linguistic structures,
the teacher can work in different stages.
I will go in detail in the part two of this video class about it.
First of all, the teacher can read the tale using
the visual aid and then design motivating activities.
For example, it would work with Little Red Riding Hood.
We can ask children to design handmade wolf masks in order to work on concepts,
on issues, emotions, such as fear, or behavioral patterns such as disobedience.
These are some examples of tale-oriented games
that can be implemented in the classroom.
Simon Says, Create a Song, Make Up a Poem, Handcrafts,
as mentioned earlier with Little Red Riding Hood,
use realia to promote vocabulary learning, mimicking, and encourage children to
tell their own stories based on tales that they already know or toys that they like.
Tales are also powerful tools in terms of social,
cultural, linguistic, and cognitive issues.
They create the perfect setting to develop this communicative
situation using English as a medium of instruction,
the medium of learning where they integrate all these skills.
Now, the question is, what is the right tale
to be selected for classroom implementation?
According to Ellis and Brewster, these are the three criteria that
teachers can follow before making a decision about the right tale.
Tales must be accessible, useful, and also
allow the learning of language and content.
So that means that must be relevant for
content and language integrated learning.
But what is the actual didactic relevance of story tales?
These three criteria will be discussed
in detail in the next coming slides.
Linguistic, psychological, and cultural.
As for the linguistic criteria, tales should have an adequate level in terms of
content in line with the curriculum, adequate vocabulary, and adequate grammar.
It should also allow working with phonetic features, intonation,
in order to help the child improve his or her own pronunciation.
The plot should be relevant, fun, interesting, easy to remember,
and use repetitive structures that allow this to be memorable,
and also to predict the story and allow
linguistic practice in the classroom.
Tales should have visual aids, visual support, that help understand
the story while it is being read or while it is being listened.
As for the psychological criteria, the plot should be motivating and allow creativity
and this desire of continuing learning about the foreign language and its culture.
The plot should also convey positive attitudes
towards learning the foreign language.
And as for the cultural criteria, the language that is used in
the tale should be representative enough of the foreign language.
and contribute to teach, to show information about the target culture and information
should be understandable for students to be able to follow the story plot.
Tales can be classified in terms of content, for example,
daily facts, as in the Very Hungry Caterpillar, Pat the Cat,
in terms of animals, showing animals, Where's Spot? or the Three Little
Pigs, and traditional tales, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
Further classifications of tales in terms of content, fairy tales, as in Cinderella or
the Little Mermaid, fantasy, the Snowman, and behavioral issues, as in I'm a Big Brother.
A different classification of tales will involve narrative features, for
example, working with rhymes, Pat the Cat, the Elephant and the Bad Baby,
using repetition, the Very Hungry Caterpillar or Where's Spot? as well, in working
with phonics, with a Squash and a Squeeze and Jingle Jangle Jungle.
Teachers can also adapt authentic tales in order
to make them easy to understand for the students.
We can do that by adapting the vocabulary, the meaning, the
semantics of the text in order to facilitate the tale comprehension.
We can also adapt the grammar, grammatical structures, for
example, we can simplify verbal tenses and using present tense,
specifically for early schoolers that would facilitate the
comprehension as well, simplifying structures, word order, etc.
So if we come across with this sentence, "What big eyes you have!"
in an authentic tale, we can adapt it as you have got big eyes.
Authentic tales can also be adapted
in terms of the organization of ideas.
We can shorten long sentences, we can reduce the number of actions, the number of
characters, and also check aspects, factors that might affect the comprehension of the tale.
For example, the use of linking devices,
deictic devices, or the use of indirect speech.
What are the linguistic contributions of tales when
learning a second language or a foreign language?
In terms of vocabulary, tales are powerful resources and we can work with
vocabulary via flashcards, snap games, using realia, using role plays,
for example, with the tale Where is
Spot, working with rhymes and gestures.
Another contribution is grammar. Children can learn about
grammar when reading a tale, when listening to tales.
And this is the case because of the repetitive structures that
tales provide, and we can do that by using realia as well.
For example, The very hungry caterpillar likes bananas.
Do you like bananas?
Using this repetitive structure, you can work on different
types of structures, related structures in this case.
In terms of oral production, we can work on learning how to
listen and also repeat instructions, as in the game Simon Says
Touch your head, for example, talking about different routines, the weather,
working on pronunciation, as in rhymes, when giving instructions in the classroom.
Further contributions will entail reading and writing, or learning how to predict,
how to classify, how to work in groups and interact in groups or in pairs.
This is the reference that has been used for this video class Pérez Cabello
(2009). La didáctica del cuento en lengua inglesa. Aplicaciones teórico-prácticas.
We used chapters 2, 3 and 5.
Thank you for your attention.
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