A good amount of new students at any international school, will likely be learning English for the first time in their young lives. Learning an entirely new language can be daunting for anyone, let alone a young child.
The fear and doubts are no doubt amplified even more when the child is required to write in that language. Some of the best ways to coax a reluctant young student writer and build their confidence would include a method known as Talk For Writing.
Talk For Writing focuses on developing spoken and practical writing skills, enabling the children to imitate the language orally for a given topic first, before then breaking it down and reading it, and only then writing their own version.
Utilising this method, the kids pick up the meaning of words, when they create or use the associated actions to match the actual language.
Talk For Writing allows the students to play with and familiarise themselves with the language, before they are formally introduced to formal written texts. The Talk For Writing toolkit provides the support to breed confidence, to explore a wider variety of language than more traditional methods.
By building on actions developed using this young learner’s method, the students can now access a bigger glossary of keywords, punctuation, and grammar. The approach is consistent for building and developing their writing skills with confidence, in parallel to their spoken English.
Not only for English as a second language, but reading will help young students to develop language skills in their native tongue as well as any other language they want to pick up.
Research has consistently shown that reading will greatly expand a kid’s vocabulary, especially in the Early Years. The same goes for reading in a different language than English, as it helps with the understanding of the words used and the corresponding meaning in the original language first.
This sort of application-induced lessons will greatly benefit students at international schools around the world, not only in writing confidently and creatively, but also with their reading and spoken language skills.
Congratulation!