Language Support Program

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Module 4.2 Teaching strategies: the Early Years

Teaching approaches for ICPAL–Purposes

Resource 4.5 outlines some examples of teaching procedures for the Purposes of language. It defines the ‘aspects of language’ and recommends appropriate ‘teaching and learning strategies’ for students with language difficulties in the Early Years.

Professional learning activities

  • Locate, gather and interpret resources

Examine ‘Resource 4.5 Examples of teaching procedures: ICPAL–Purposes’. Try to understand its content and its recommended approach. You might like to compare the ‘Aspect of language’ with the ICPAL language framework (Appendix 3) to see where each aspect fits.

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Print Resource 4.5 and put it in your teaching portfolio. Use it in developing teaching and learning activities that support the development of the Purposes of language for a student or students with language difficulties.

 

Activities for ICPAL–Purposes

The following is a collection of teaching activities for teaching the conventions of language in the Early Years of schooling. While activities are arranged under the Purposes component of the ICPAL framework, all language exchanges involve using skills across the ICPAL areas.

Although some activities are confined to particular levels of skills and interest, the majority of these activities can be adapted for use across year Prep to Year 4, and across ability levels.

Professional learning activities

  • Locate, gather and interpret resources

Browse through the following teaching activities for Purposes. With which are you familiar? Have you already used any of these activities in a class? Consider copying, adapting, and adding to these in a teaching portfolio for use in practical teaching activities to develop language and literacy, or in supporting students with language difficulties.

  • Use reflective learning techniques

Individually, or in pairs, attempt to match activities to the ‘Aspects of language’ and ‘Teaching and learning strategies’ in ‘Resource 4.5 Examples of teaching procedures: ICPAL–Purposes’.

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Purposes

Battleships

  • An excellent barrier game to encourage students to give and listen to clear directions. Each player has a grid with numbers along the top and letters down the side. The students place a range of planes, boats, ships in a square and the other students have to guess which square they are in. To help develop good language skills, encourage the students to ask questions and give answers in full sentences (e.g. Do you have a ship in A3?)

Guess who

  • Guess who is a commercially available game which is ideal for younger students. This game encourages specific questioning skills and the ability to listen to and process information.

Stressed out

  • Give the students a sentence and ask them to say the sentence differently depending on the situation. Talk to the students about how we talk differently depending on our conversational situation or partner. (For example, use the sentence Watch out for that applied to different characters and situations such as a current affairs presenter, a jungle explorer, a teacher, players on a sports field, a parent, etc.)

You’ve got to be joking (1)

  • Collect jokes, riddles, puns or video comedy sketches and share them with students. Have the students, in small groups, analyse what language rules have been violated to create the humour.

You’ve got to be joking (2)

  • Just as any good hollywood movie is followed up by a sequel, so too is this game! In this game, use joke books for students to read jokes to each other without using expression. The other students must analyse why the joke was either still funny or not funny at all.

Look who’s talking

  • In this game, take a box to the class that has a variety of different sentences in it. The students select a sentence and have to work out who might be saying it and in what context.

Blindfold alley

  • In this game, the students set up a safe obstacle course in a room. One student is blindfolded and has to make their way to the prize by asking questions and following the directions given by their fellow students. This game promotes clear direction-giving and clarification skills.

Problem prophets

  • In this activity, students are given situations that they must problem- solve. For example, Ralph wants to go to the movies, but doesn’t have enough pocket money. What could he do? Books of problem-solving activities are commercially available.
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Role play

  • This is an excellent tool for teaching appropriate social behaviours. The teacher comes up with age-appropriate hypothetical scenarios and the students must act out both positive/negative ways of dealing with the situation. The differences between the ways of behaving and the resulting outcome can be discussed.

Social autopsy

  • Students work out what went wrong in a conversation or social interaction. Teachers can use this in real life situations as well as structured practice conditions.

Non-verbal Nellie

  • Students have to act out something that they are thinking about, and the rest of the class have to work out what they are thinking and how they are feeling based on the non-verbal cues. The students can also discuss how to use non-verbal cues to read real-life social situations. Explicit teaching of non-verbal behaviours is a valuable part of language teaching.

Charades

  • This is another opportunity for students to both practise and read non-verbal language. Modifications to the traditional rules could include miming a feeling, or for other students to guess what words might accompany the non-verbal communication.

Acting out figurative language

  • The teacher provides a list of similes, metaphors and figurative language. The students choose one to act out and the others have to guess what they are doing. You can vary the level of support by e.g. having the list in front of students to begin with (e.g. pigs might fly; as thin as a rake; he was as white as a ghost).

Idiom idol

  • In this game, the teacher provides a list of idioms to students. Each student chooses an idiom and tries to work out where the idiom came from (e.g. He let the cat out of the bag – the student might decide that this idiom could have come someone trying to smuggle a cat into a classroom).

You want what?

  • Students have a list of indirect instructions/requests (e.g. It’s cold in this room isn’t it? which means Can you turn on the heater?) and the students must work out a more direct way of saying it. Conversely, students can be given a direct instruction and have to think of how it could be asked indirectly. Talk to the students about why people often put things indirectly and how they can both understand others better and be less likely to offend others if they ask indirectly.

Turn-taking

  • Any commercially available game in which students need to take turns can be incorporated into explicit teaching about turn-taking and waiting turns.

Holding the floor

  • A game for older students where two students are in a role-play and one student is instructed to dominate the conversation and to hold his or her turn for as long as possible, using whatever means they can. You could have a range of pragmatic rules that are being broken in this game. The trick is that the other person does not know what rule it is, but has a discussion about what rules were broken at the end of the conversation.

Colour me the same

  • In this barrier game, two students are given identical pictures (beware of the level of complexity of pictures) and identical markers or pencils. They have a barrier between them and are instructed to make their pictures identical. The only way they can do this without looking is to give clear instructions, follow the directions closely, and clarify when they are not understood. There is a range of magnetic pictures and reusable sticker books that can be used in the same way.
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