Linguistic creativity training – is this something English teachers need?
Can teachers learn to use repetitive, rhythmical, onomatopoeic language spontaneously – echoing and transforming students’ words – to react flexibly, supportively, correctly and comprehensively, beyond the straitjacket of an initiation-response-feedback exchange? The language and literature of childhood is full of language play; therefore I suggest a course design for teachers, Creative Reading and Writing, which aims at cultivating their creative verbal performances.
7 April 2009
2 years 6 weeks
Hi Janice
Followed you here from your comment on my page - thank you for that.
I have really enjoyed reading your paper. I haven't taught young children myself, but we brought up two daughters (now in their late thirties) and are now enjoying interacting with our five grandchildren.
Children make their own sense of what they hear, including what they hear in their mother tongue, I can remember our two daughters aged about five and three arguing about the second line of 'The Teddy Bears' picnic', fllowing the opening 'If you go down in the woods today' and leading on to the gathering of all the bears. The older one heard it as 'You'd better go in the skies' - presumably to avoid being ambushed by the bears on the ground. The younger one heard it as 'You'd better grow into size' - so that you would be big enough to handle any trouble from the bears. The actual line is, of course, 'You'd better go in disguise'. The word 'disguise' was probably beyond them, but that didn't get in the way of their enjoyment.
This little anecdote made me wonder just how much children do 'understand' and how much they fill the gaps with their own ingenuity.
18 April 2009
2 years 5 weeks
Hi Dave,
"Filling in gaps with their own ingenuity" - as you have shown with your anecdote children do this and must do this to learn. I guess the tremendous task for language teaching is to keep children inferring and experimenting - also with the stories they hear and multi-layered picture books they read - and not expect absolute meanings either with language or literature.
It's lovely how you remember the exact words your daughters used, and also lovely how your daughters recognised the pattern - their invented rhyme words "skies" and "size" to rhyme with "You'll never believe your eyes". This exciting language pattern - within a wonderful teddy bear adventure story set to catchy music - seems to have fired their creativity. Not easy to match in language lessons!