Teaching english to very young learners through authentic communicative performances

Abstract

We present here the results for the kindergarten level of a qualitative research study on the impact of a curriculum connecting learningevents in Spanish and English in authentic communicative performances. The school in the study was a private institution in a mid-sizedColombian city. The curriculum is based on communicative and constructivist principles and presents the learning events as communicativeauthentic performances. We describe the performances that the kindergarten teachers developed based on the curriculum, how they achievedauthenticity in them, and their impact on the students’ attitude towards the English class and on their learning. We analyzed four teacherinterviews and four class observations done over a year, plus two more class recordings made independently by the teachers. They revealthat teachers used a variety of games, especially role-playing games developed from ideas from the children, reading of stories, and songsand that the students became enthusiastic and active and improved their oral skills considerably.

Keywords

• constructivism in English teaching, authentic communicative performances, education for bilingualism, preschool English as a foreign language