Chapter Features of teaching English to children of primary school age

1.2. Features of teaching English to preschool children.
At an early stage of education, language should first of all be considered as a means of developing the child's personality, taking into account motives, interests and abilities. Through communication and activity in the language and through activity with the language, the child develops, is brought up, learns the world and himself, i.e. masters all the spiritual wealth that the process of foreign language education can give the child. Early development is as practical as language proficiency itself, as it is a prerequisite for successful learning in the future.
So, the following four aspects must be introduced into the content of teaching foreign language communication at an early stage: developing (priority), educational, cognitive and educational. The goal of learning in all aspects can be formulated as follows:
- development of the mental functions of the child through the process of mastering a foreign language;
- meeting the cognitive needs of the child;
- creating a child's motivation for further mastery of a foreign language;
- education of a citizen not only of his country, but also of the world;
- Improving the effectiveness of language acquisition.
The process of teaching preschoolers has a number of specific features.
It is important for a child what language “brings” with it, therefore the content aspects of learning (what to talk about, what to listen to, what to do, including with the help of language) are a priority, while learning should affect the interests of preschoolers and meet their needs in communication and knowledge.
The lesson should be considered not as a lesson (in its traditional sense), but as an organization of a joint business (that is, a lesson) with children. For these purposes, it is necessary to widely practice group, collective forms of work, in the process of which the language is organically integrated into the activity and accompanies it in a natural way. It is important to create conditions in which the child feels relaxed and free, experiences positive emotions.
Given the age and individual characteristics of preschoolers, it is necessary to use a game as a methodological technique that allows you to create a situation in which the child cannot “keep silent”. At the same time, one should refer not only to role-playing games that have become traditional in teaching practice, but also to outdoor games in which language material can also be practiced. These are mimic games, finger games, games like loto, dominoes, folding pictures, etc.
The child masters a new language for him in the process of interaction - communication with an adult and with each other, friends, heroes of a fairy tale. At the same time, it is important that the child understands the purpose of each of his speech and non-verbal actions, its end result, and also feels the need to use a foreign language as a means of communication. In the process of communication, information that is fascinating and accessible to children (a fairy tale plot, unusual adventures of fairy tale heroes, etc.) should be used, acting characters with their own “character”, “history” should be constantly introduced into the created plot. This will allow preschoolers to organize typical and favorite listening, storytelling and storytelling based on the story.³
Since a child cannot successfully develop without all his thoughts, knowledge and skills being embodied in various types of activities, in practice, training must make much wider use of the possibilities of visual, musical, dance and other activities and make the most of the possibilities of integrative learning. A child, in order to help his favorite characters get out of all sorts of funny, funny and dangerous situations, must understand something during the trip, say something in a foreign language. Acting in this way, he imperceptibly not only learns a large amount of lexical and grammatical material, but also develops the linguistic abilities and mental functions necessary for mastering a foreign language.
Classes should not be boring “technical” exercises for the child to memorize foreign words and grammatical structures. These should be lessons full of all sorts of “adventures”. While visiting English-speaking countries with a traveling frog, the child gets acquainted with the history, traditions, customs and holidays of these countries, meets literary heroes of English-language children's literature: Mary Poppins, heroes of Kipling's fairy tales and many others, and through communication with these heroes masters a foreign language and its culture.
An important feature of this technique is the plot method of organizing a lesson. The lesson is a single storyline driven by some event: real (holiday), fictional, playful or fabulous. Each lesson, in turn, is a link in the storyline of the entire course of learning. The plot provides motivation for the speech-cogitative activity of children in the lesson. In fact, they are constantly included in the game, in a fairy tale, communication, they have to solve interesting behavioral, game, cognitive and other tasks, and a foreign language acts as a means of solving them.
The process of teaching foreign language communication is a model of real communication according to the following main parameters: motivation, purposefulness, informativeness of the communication process, novelty, situationality, functionality, the nature of the interaction of those who communicate and the system of speech means. Due to this, in the scenarios of the lessons, communication conditions are created that are adequate to the real ones, which ensures the successful mastery of speech skills and their use by children in conditions of real communication. The successful implementation of this principle largely depends on the teacher's ability to create a favorable psychological climate and his ability to be a real speech partner.
When learning a foreign language, not only the process of mastering is individual (each student has different abilities, and, consequently, his own pace of progress), but also the object of assimilation. The speech of any person, regardless of age and language, is individual in at least three ways: the mechanism of speech motivation is purely individual (what excites one person leaves another indifferent); the content of a speech statement is individual (for a person expresses himself in speech); finally, the way of formulating a thought is individual (the same thought is expressed by different people by different speech means). In order for the student to show his individuality, there are two rules in the classroom: the rule of redundant presentation of the material and the rule of delaying the results of its assimilation. This means that within the framework of the same exercise, children are always given the right to choose, i.e. the ability to choose one or another speech means in accordance with one's needs, taste, mood, etc. Therefore, it is impossible to demand from the child that he learn all the new material presented in the classroom. In total, about 300 lexical units are presented for teaching speaking. Taking into account the percentage of redundancy and depending on the abilities of the child, his individual active vocabulary can range from 150 to 250 lexical units. You should not be upset if, at the end of the lesson, not every child has mastered the minimum required material. The plot line is constructed in such a way that a group of lexical units or a certain grammatical construction is repeated in new situations a sufficient number of times. As teaching practice has shown, the most capable students can learn the material from a single presentation, capable - after two or three times study, less capable - by the end of training. This manifests the rule of delayed result, which ensures the individual pace of progress for each child.⁴
Communicative training, which is the basis of the proposed manual, is built in such a way that all its content and organization are permeated with novelty. Novelty prescribes the use of texts and exercises containing something new for children, the variability of texts built on the same material, the constant variability of the components of recreated situations, learning conditions, the variability of the forms of speech statements, tasks and examples of their implementation, etc. Thus, the rejection of deliberate memorization (statements, dialogues, texts, etc.) is determined, speech production, heuristics and productivity of students' speech skills develop , interest in educational, cognitive and any other activity is aroused.

Chapter 2. Methods of teaching pronunciation in English lessons at the initial stage.