Structuring Fun for Young Learners in the ELT Classroom

Practical ideas and advice for teaching English to children to engage and inspire them throughout their primary schooling

Structuring Fun for Young Learners in the ELT Classroom is a textbook full of lesson ideas, exercises and tips for teaching English as a foreign language to young learners.

Structuring Fun for Young Learners in the ELT Classroom is designed for ELT teachers, directors of studies and academic managers. It provides an extensive repertoire of creative ideas and techniques to work with in the classroom.

Teaching young learners can be a huge amount of fun. As teachers, we can introduce all sorts of games, projects and variations on traditional exercises. All this needs careful structuring if the resulting activity is to be manageable and, more importantly, if it is going to help students learn and practise words and sentences in English. In Structuring Fun for Young Learners you’ll learn about the principles behind that structure. Chris Roland provides a roller coaster ride of colourful ideas, examples and anecdotes for your classroom. In addition, there are over three hundred diagrams and photographs to help explain exactly how the described activities work and give you the flavor of ELT classes at primary level.

When fun in the classroom is properly structured, everyone is a winner. Your students will remember those activities for years and you will still be able to cover your course content without compromising on classroom management. For this to happen, we have to ask important questions such as: ‘How do children behave in classrooms?’, ‘Why do they want to do some tasks and refuse to do others?’, ‘What is learning anyway and how can we tie our target words and sentences to the activities we do?’. These fundamentals are covered in the first five chapters of the book.

The second part of the book explores movement, text, space, novelty objects, teacher-student dialogue, personalisation, clips, images, support for learners, and the use of coursebooks. In addition, it examines your own professional development as a young learner teacher. So, whether you are a new teacher, a seasoned veteran or a teacher trainer with young learners classes, Structuring Fun for Young Learners in the ELT Classroom is for you.

The Teaching English series offers a mixture of methodology and practical ideas for teachers of English as a foreign language. Like Understanding Teenagers in the ELT Classroom by Chris Roland, this book can be used:

for self-study,
as guided reading on more structured training courses,
by trainers preparing their own sessions at an in-house level.