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ABSTRACT
This article argues that young learners (aged approximately four to twelve) do not need study books but need action books instead. Coursebooks which make them learn the language explicitly not only typically achieve very little in terms of acquisition but often demotivate and disengage the learners. What they need are coursebooks which help them to acquire the language implicitly through experience and performance of the language in communication. The article puts forward the theoretical justification for developing such language in action books for young learners and provides examples of the sort of activities which are proposed for inclusion in them.
KEY WORDS
Kinaesthetic, performance, engagement, communication.
1.INTRODUCTION
Many researchers, and my own experience, suggest that young learners are predominantly kinaesthetic, experiential and performative learners of languages who can acquire language more effectively through language driven physical activity, meaningful exposure and language use than through static study (Bland, 2013, 2015b; Enever, 2011; Ghosn, 2016; Kolb, 2012; Lefever, 2012; Pinter, 2015; Read, 2015; Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2018). Yet many young learners' coursebooks and many young learners' lessons which I have observed are still driven by curricula which specify language teaching points and by methodologies which feature explicit desk-sitting learning of discrete items of language (see Arnold & Rixon, 2008; Bacha, Ghosn, & McBeath, 2008; Ghosn, 2013a, 2013b, 2016, for studies which reveal this prevailing and unfortunate tendency).
There are many apparent exceptions to my generalisation about the tendency of young learner coursebooks to still feature syllabus-driven explicit teaching of language. Oxford Discover (Koustaff et al., 2019), for example, claims to be an inquiry-based primary school course which focuses on critical thinking, collaboration, communication and creativity. It has a controlled vocabulary and grammar-based syllabus (which teachers, according to Thomas and Reinders (2016) and Thornbury (forthcoming) for example, still seem to demand) but it claims to take a learner-active discovery approach to grammar and that most of the grammar activities are in a separate booklet. When you go to the coursebooks, you find that there is some personalisation, the learners are sometimes asked to think and there are a few songs. However, there are also a lot of comprehension questions, a lot of vocabulary and grammar practice activities, very little authentic communication and very few discovery or...