Activity Approach In Primary English Classes

There is a great deal of concern about whether teachers and schools could help children acquire the knowledge, skills, and ability to adapt to the social circumstances, crucial for their lives outside school and in their future positions. The challenge that teachers are facing is how to make the learning in schools more authentic, more useful and more practical, so that they can solve problems that they may confront in and out of school.At present, more and more language researchers have shown greater interests in teaching strategies and their studies obviously show that the proper teaching/learning strategies are surely of great use to the language learners.Primary English is a new subject for the primary pupils. Primary school English teaching must suit the characteristic of children's physiology and mentality. The teaching method should be based on the children's characteristic. Children are good at imitating, saying, singing, and acting. The teacher should organize activities of rich varieties in class, such as English competition, English interview, dialogue, story, game, play, recitation, contests, forums, debates, performances, etc. That is to say, teachers must ensure that classroom interactions are managed, not just by the teacher, but by all present. To facilitate language acquisition, pupils need much practice. The class leadership should not be performed by the teacher, but should be conducted by the pupil or a member from the group. This is the reason why the author tries to use the "Activity Approach" or "Learning by Doing" in primary English classes.The current curriculum syllabus suggest that the teacher apply the strategy of the "Task-Based Learning" in English classroom. In the current curriculum, task-based language teaching is advocated. It emphasized "learning by doing". In the last twenty...