Anmeldung an: englischdidaktik@hu-berlin.de A university TEFL-course on „Kinder- und Jugendliteratur“ – why, there are textbooks galore?!? Well, the narrative mode of thinking is (according to Jerome Bruner, one of the most prolific and influential scholars in psychology, language aquisition and educational theory) the primary mode of cognition, by which the human mind processes language (or discourse-) bound social experience and interaction. Telling stories to children (and vice versa, listening to tales and other fictional genres as a child) entails pre-forms of literacy, by which both first language acquisition of pre-school kids and primary school learners’ mastery of literate techniques are given a significant boost. „Good“ first language learners tend to be successful second or foreign language learners. Thus it stands to reason that EFL teachers should exploit the huge potential of children’s and young adult learners’ literature written in English (each year about 5.000 new works get published) – both in primary and in secondary schools as well as in regular and in bilingual / immersion or CLIL classes. After all, these texts do not only appeal to the child’s or adolescent’s general interests in life, but they also attract their imagination, their sense of verbal humour and creativity. And not to forget: Usually they are carefully composed; that is, in linguistic and visual terms they are „constructed“ (ie. scripted and drawn) in a way which holds their attention and promotes the acquisition of the language at all its systemic levels (ie. the intake of text, grammatical and phonological structures, as well as of vocabulary and idiomatic language use). Fictional texts of this kind offer the EFL classroom a valuable blend of interesting authentic material and of carefully graded didactic resources. Recommended pre-reading: Andrew Wright (1995): Storytelling with Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press. dto. (1997): Creating Stories with Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press. J. Morgan / Mario Rinvolucri (1983): Once upon a Time: Using Stories in the Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heide Niemann (2002): Mit Bilderbüchern Englisch lernen. Seelze: Kallmeyer. D. Tierney / P. Dobson (1995): Are you sitting comfortably? Telling Stories to Young Language Learners. London: CILT [Young Pathfinder 3]. You are expected to attend regularly, prepare an oral presentation, upload your slides on the moodle platform and hand in a written assignment by mid-August 2013 (if you decide to write it in this area). |
