When I was about six years old I got lost walking home from school. I always walked home from school, so I knew the way very well and never had to think about it. It never took much more than fifteen minutes. It was a happy routine.
But on this particular day it was unbelievably foggy. Very thick fog. It was late afternoon, autumn, cold and damp. I...
It comes as no surprise that the demands of our ever-developing society would at some point leave its mark on the generations which will succeed us. The necessity to harness a young individual’s true potential with the purpose of integrating it into the global machine has already taken its effect, as schools constantly update and enrich their syllabuses...
By Nancy Tasiopoulou, English Teacher, Doukas Primary School
Teaching young learners is a unique experience, as it brings together the use of art, music, games, storytelling and technology. Not one day in the kindergarten is the same with another, as the children’s spontaneous and inquisitive nature can lead the lesson to new paths of acquiring...
Pre-School English as an Additional Language is notorious for the inexplicable challenge it withholds for us, teachers. Yet, phonemes and morphemes are the simplest units of language. Still, those feel impossible to teach to 3-year-olds. The answer lies in the medium. Pre-school children are ready to acquire even more complex entities than phonemes...
As English teachers, we’re almost always on the lookout for new and interesting ways to stimulate our language learners. It was ELT author and researcher Stephen D. Krashen who gave us his Affective Filter hypothesis of Second or Foreign language acquisition. (Krashen – Terrell, 1983)
His hypothesis states, that conditions which promote low...
By Evangelia Vassilakou
Definition and general characteristics of limericks
Limericks are one of the most favourite poetic forms among children, and were popularized by Edward Lear. They originated in England the 18th or early 19th century. The fun of the limericks lies in their rollicking rhythm and broad humour. They are also easy to remember...
We know that the essential ingredient that enables motivation to facilitate deep student learning is engagement. And as educators, we are very aware of how important it is for our learners to be engaged. Engagement has been defined as the extent to which students are connected to what they are learning, how they are learning it, and who they are learning...
Quite often in a monolingual family we are confronted with the dilemma of what is the appropriate age for our kids to start learning a foreign language. Should they first be exposed to a new language as early as kindergarten or should we wait until the first years of primary school, when our little ones try to master the written form of their mother...
Characteristics of Young Learners
By Marina Siskou
The conventional feeling towards the definition of “Young Learners” is that it is interchangeable with the concept of childhood.
Annamaria Pinter (2011) divides Young Learners into three groups.
The first group, preschool or early school years, is comprised of children who initiate...
