Diane Phillips, Sarah Burwood, Helen Dunford
Projects with Young Learners
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ISBN: 978 0194372213
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Illustrations by: Margaret Wellbank
Additional illustrations by: Mary Burwood
Cover illustration by: Val Saunders
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all our many colleagues who we have worked with on Bell Young Learners courses. Ideas develop and change from teacher to teacher and from course to course and get better and better. Many of the ideas in this book have been adapted and developed by ourselves and teachers working on our courses. Our special thanks to all those teachers, particularly to Karen Barnes, Rebecca Hudson and Beverly Close, who have all worked on Island projects of different kinds in the past, and to Helen Wood who first showed the ‘Elect a President’ activity when we were working at Studio School together.
The authors and publisher are grateful to those who have given permission to reproduce the following extract of copyright material.
‘Happy birthday to you’ words and music by Patty S. Hill and Mildred Hill © 1935 (renewed 1962), Summy Birchard Inc., USA and Keith Prowse Music Pub. Co. Ltd., EMI Music Publishing Limited, London WC2H OEA. Reproduced by permission of IMP Ltd.
The author and series editor
Diane Phillips trained as a teacher and then went on to do her MA and PhD in Applied Linguistics. She has worked as a teacher, teacher trainer, and Director of Studies at various schools throughout the world. She has recently been involved in the formulation of guidelines for EAQUALS inspection of centres which hold courses for young learners. She is currently working as the Head of Young Learners’ and Offsite Courses at the Bell Educational Trust, a Senior Assessor for the UCLES DTEFLA/DELTA scheme, and is a member of a working party on awards for teachers of young learners: CELTYL and DELTYL. She has been involved in the writing of several other publications, including Teaching Practice Handbook (with Gower and Walters, Heinemann 1995), and ‘Teacher Training: Observation and Feedback’ (in Learning to Train: Perspectives on the Development of Language Teacher Trainers, edited by Ian McGrath, Prentice Hall 1997).
Sarah Burwood has a BA Honours degree and an RSA DTEFLA. She has worked as a teacher and teacher trainer in Italy. She has also been Director of Offsite Courses, Youth Programmes Co-ordinator, and Course Director for the Studio School of English in Cambridge. Until recently, she was an Academic Manager for Young Learners courses at the Bell Educational Trust in Saffron Waiden, and is currently working as a ESL/EFL teacher and freelance teacher trainer in Vancouver.
Helen Dunford has an MA in Applied Linguistics, a PGCE in TESOL, and an RSA DTEFLA. She has over eighteen years of teaching experience, including five years in primary English at the Ecole Française de Londres and a bilingual junior school in Lyon. She has worked as a teacher of young learners at The British Council in Naples, and co-ordinated training courses for teachers in Argentina, Colombia and Bulgaria. Until 1997 she was Head of Studies of the Young Learners Department of the Bell Educational Trust in Saffron Waiden. She is currently working as Academic Director of International House, Portland, Santa Monica and San Francisco.
Alan Maley worked for The British Council from 1962 to 1988, serving as English Language Officer in Yugoslavia, Ghana, Italy, France, and China, and as Regional Representative for The British Council in South India (Madras). From 1988 to 1993 he was Director-General of the Bell Educational Trust, Cambridge. From 1993 to 1998 he was Senior Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature of the National University of Singapore. He is currently a freelance consultant. He is also Dean of the Institute of English Language Education, and Director of the graduate English Programme at Assumption University in Bangkok. He wrote Quartet (with Françoise Grellet and Wim Welsing, OUP 1982), and Literature, in this series (with Alan Duff, OUP 1990). He has also written Beyond Words, Sounds Interesting, Sounds Intriguing, Words, Variations on a Theme, and Drama Techniques in Language Learning (all with Alan Duff), The Mind’s Eye (with Françoise Grellet and Alan Duff), Learning to Listen and Poem into Poem (with Sandra Moulding).
Foreword
The demand for materials suitable for use with young learners continues to grow. Many of the materials currently available offer sets of activities which the teacher can draw upon to supplement regular course materials, or to introduce novelty.
This book differs from such materials in offering coherently organized projects which can engage the learner over a period of time. Each project is broken down into a set of self-contained units, which can be used separately or built up sequentially into a final project outcome.
The advantages of this approach are:
– that the projects aim to draw upon the ‘whole child’, that is to say, all aspects of children’s life, not simply their linguistic competence. This enables them to relate what they know from their own lives to a concrete problem worked through in the target language.
– that the projects encourage, even demand, that learners take a greater responsibility for their own