An Investigation On Application Of Activities-based Approach In Teaching English To Children

With the further development of China,English becomes more and more important for Chinese to communicate with other countries and more and more Chinese children begin to learn English.English will help children to have more opportunities in the future.However,compared with adults,children have shorter attention spans and are more energetic.To teach English to children,it is important to understand characteristics and cognitive features of English learning of kindergarten children.It also requires us knowing the principles of children language teaching.Activities-based approach is an integrated approach by which teachers organize and guide the students to conduct various interactive activities in class,such as games,role-play,music,songs,and storytelling.This thesis investigates on the application of activities-based approach in children' English teaching and aims to answer the following research questions:(1)What kinds of activities are more often used in kindergarten children's English teaching?(2)What kinds of activities are more popular among the children in the kindergarten?(3)How do teachers organize the activities-based English class and what are their perspectives about activities-based approach?The author first reviewed the related research home and abroad,the theory of Piaget's cognitive development,John Dewey's theory of “learning by doing” and Krashen's theory of second language acquisition,and then conducted an investigation of activity-based approach in teaching English to kindergarten children.It can be seen from the results of children questionnaires and interviews with kindergarten children,and observations that activities-based approach is popular among young learners,the most popular activities among them and teachers' commonly used activities include games,songs,storytelling and role play.In the process of classroom observations and teachers' interviews,the author investigated the teachers' organizing of activities and their perspectives about the approach,especially about teachers' role,instructions giving features and time control.From the study,the author suggests that English teaching to children should be based on the principles of children language teaching.It is suggested that teachers should improve the skills of activities organizations.Firstly,Instructions of the activities must be clear and short so that students can understand their task.Secondly,teachers' role should vary in different stages of the activities to organize the activities well.At last,time should be controlled to achieve the teaching objectives.The current study still has some limitations.Firstly,the limited number of the subjects cannot represent all the children in Xinjiang.Moreover,the real class observation is only conducted among 10 teachers.For this limitation,future researches are expected to explore this topic.