Improving Oral Communication Skills in Early Childhood English Education through Communicative Activities
Main Article Content
Abstract
The development of oral communication skills in early childhood English education has become a priority in contemporary language pedagogy, particularly in contexts where English is taught as a foreign language (EFL). This paper discusses the efficiency of the communicative activities that could be implemented in order to develop the oral communication skills among preschool learners. Based on CLT principles and early childhood pedagogy, the study develops an approach that infuses communicative, interactive, play-based, and child-centered practices into the teaching of English. Using a quasi-experimental research design, two independents control and experimental groups of preschool learners were used. Collection of data through observation, oral performance tasks and pre-test and post-test. These results show that the communicative activities help to improve learners speaking fluency, pronunciation, vocabulary, and willingness to communicate. The article comes to the conclusion that the systematic incorporation of communicative activities into the process of teaching and learning early years English directs positive pedagogical conditions for the encapsulation in oral communication skills.
Article Details
Issue
Section
How to Cite
References
[1] J. Brewster, G. Ellis, and D. Girard, The Primary English Teacher’s Guide. London: Penguin, 2002.
[2] H. D. Brown, Principles of Language Learning and Teaching, 5th ed. New York: Pearson Education, 2007.
[3] J. Bruner, Child’s Talk: Learning to Use Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
[4] L. Cameron, Teaching Languages to Young Learners. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
[5] R. Ellis, Language Teaching Research and Language Pedagogy. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012.
[6] D. Willis and J. Willis, Doing Task Based Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
[7] J. Harmer, How to Teach English. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007.
[8] D. Hymes, “On Communicative Competence,” in Sociolinguistics, J. B. Pride and J. Holmes, Eds., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, pp. 269–293.
[9] S. Krashen, The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications. London: Longman, 1985.
[10] P. M. Lightbown and N. Spada, How Languages Are Learned, 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
[11] A. Pinter, Teaching Young Language Learners, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
[12] J. C. Richards, Communicative Language Teaching Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
[13] S. J. Savignon, Communicative Language Teaching: Linguistic Theory and Classroom Practice. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
[14] W. A. Scott and L. H. Ytreberg, Teaching English to Children. London: Longman, 1990.
[15] L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019.