Writing With Children Resource Books for Teachers
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| Writing With Children Resource Books for Teachers |
There is a quantum leap between acquiring the ability to speak and
understand a language and learning to read and write it. Writing is
not a natural activity in the way that speaking is. Many children
experience difficulty in crossing the bridge from oral competence to
literacy, even in their first language. In a foreign or other language
the problems are that much greater.
This book offers an approach to developing the complex set of
cognitive and motor skills needed if children are to be able to write
in the foreign language. The approach is carefully gradual, offering
teachers a rich array of activities for developing literacy skills. These
range from pre-writing activities, through letters, words, and
sentences to the text level. The book recognizes that literacy is not
developed overnight, and that time is a crucial ingredient: hence the
gradual approach.
It is easy for children to become discouraged when learning to write
(and to read).The authors are at pains to make the activities
pleasurable, personalized, and meaningful, in a learning
atmosphere which values the attempts the children make.The
activities draw on the full range of sensory modalities, and are
integrated into the overall framework of language learning.
The situations in which children are taught to read English (or any
other foreign language) are clearly extremely varied, ranging from
those where the children cannot yet read in their own language (and
which may have a different script from English), to those where they
are already fairly proficient readers in their first language, and share
a Latin script. The activities in the book offer useful ideas for the full
range of situations teachers are likely to meet.
The information age in which we live, if anything, reinforces the
need for literacy skills. This book makes literacy a key element in the
overall teaching of the foreign language from an early age. It will be
an invaluable support to teachers in helping their learners ‘think
literacy’.