Young learner expert, Annamaria Pinter joins me to talk about getting young learners to communicate with each other.
Hi Anna Maria, thanks for joining us. We're going to be talking about using tasks and communicative activities with young learners. I think tasks are something that's obviously common to see in classes with adults but it's probably less common to see them being used with kids.
Tell us about some communicative tasks that teachers can do with children. So any kind of very minimal information gap task would be communicative. One of my favourite things to do with children that doesn't require any preparation or anything at all is for you to put your bag on the desk and say to the children, guess what's in my bag? And of course, again, you can elevate this activity to making it into a nice bag or a magic bag or a magic sack or whatever you wanted.
And you could have all kinds of unusual things in your bag or usual things. And something as simple as that generates so much interest because everyone naturally wants to guess what is in the bag. It's a very simple game.
It's a guessing game. It requires very little language. So, depending on what language the children might know, they might just shout out words or they might say, have you got or is there or are there? There's really quite a lot of different ways you can encourage the guessing.
You can then invite people to do this in groups so the kids can use flashcards if they haven't got the interesting objects and put them in some kind of a bag and then let the others guess it. But I think what drives this very simple activity is the motivation to want to guess something that you don't know. So, this is the information gap.
I know something that the rest of them don't know and I can therefore enthuse them to try and guess something that is in my bag. So, very simple gap activities like that work really, really well with children and they can be kind of turned into very similar activities with drawings. So, if you have simple drawings with one or two difference between the two drawings, I mean, they're very good because the kids will enjoy trying to guess where the difference is.
You can make this more complex and more difficult by including several differences and you can hide those differences in a way that linguistically becomes more complex to try and find them. But you don't have to. It can be as simple as two apples and three bananas and in another picture you've got four apples and seven bananas.
It's still fun to guess what the difference is. So, I think some teachers listening might wonder if those activities that you just described would be too difficult for their students. But actually, students tend to improve on how well they do on a task the more they repeat the task.
You've done research on this, looking at how children's performance on a spot the difference task changes and improves as they repeat the task. Can you tell us about that and why does it happen? So, first of all, I guess kids like repetition. They find it comforting.
I mean, anyone who knows children knows that they will always ask for the same stories, that they ask for the games they like to play. And with something like the spot the differences task that I used, I noticed that in the break when we were not doing the research, the children were actually spontaneously practicing with spot the difference tasks, not just the ones that I used because those were obviously given to them and then taken back. But they began to produce their own.
They drew their own and I never told them to do that. But I was delighted because that alone told me that they were enjoying it. They found it quite fun to do.
So, as a teacher, if you notice that the children enjoy something, it's always a good idea to allow them to create maybe their own versions of the tasks. And then I encourage them to give their own versions to each other to try out and they love that. I mean, the person who designed the task loved it that actually I noticed it and I encouraged to others and the people who ended up working with it were also quite curious because it's little Johnny who designed this.
So, let's have a go. It's much more interesting than to do a task from the book. So, repetition is also kind of a golden thing because I recently discovered that with the wonderful technologies we've got available to us now, if you allow the children to record themselves and then play it back, they will have this immediate feedback about their performance.
The immediate feedback like you watch yourself do a task, you suddenly begin to notice, oh, I shouldn't have said that or I've made that mistake or the question you asked, you know, you didn't quite ask it right. So, immediately they want to press the button again and record again and do it again. And in a project where I asked the children to record their presentations, I gave them these iPads and I thought, oh, maybe I need to start by asking them how this works and go to this app and press this.
But before I said anything, they were already pressing it and they were recording themselves. And of course, what do you do once you recorded your three-minute thing? You will want to watch it. And don't we all then ask ourselves, oh, no, how did I say that? Why did I say that? Oh, there's a mistake.
And they immediately began to work on their performance and then delete, press again and try and do it better. And some of them recorded the small task three, four times before I could say anything, just because once it's recorded, it's a product that is visible and available and can be uploaded somewhere, then it should be as good as possible. So, you don't want to leave it kind of half-baked and erming and erming and full of mistakes.
So, you're so motivated to work on it and do it again and again and again. And I just think it's magic because how much time do we spend as teachers telling the kids, oh, look through it again, there's a mistake or redo this again. And the kids will go, oh, not again, I don't want to.
But with something as immediate as the film or the picture of yourself, there is this very natural inclination to want to do better. But when I told the kids that I'm going to put up their final presentations on my website, suddenly everyone wanted to do better. And they were asking me, well, will my granddad be able to see it? And I said, well, sure.
Yeah, if they bother to go there and have a look, they will be able to see it. So, you know, maybe in your classroom, when everyone is repeating the task, aim for some kind of reward or external audiences are very important, I think. So, if a child thinks you're just practicing because for no good reason, but if your final production can be uploaded somewhere for everyone to see or go into an exhibition or going to be viewed by others, then there is a point to it, then you want to do as well as possible.
So, I think projects that have some kind of a purpose that will go somewhere to an exhibition to exchange with other kids or go for display in an assembly or anything like that will give people this extra impetus to do well and repeat the task several times so that the final version is as good as possible. Now, having said all that, it's certainly not the case that tasks which work for adults will also necessarily work with kids. I know in your research, you've had students do the activity or the task in their first language before getting them to do it in English.
What did you find out about what makes something like, for example, Spot the Difference challenging for 10-year-olds? Yeah, I did a lot of work on this because my own PhD study was with tasks and the cognitive demands of a particular task. One of the things I recommended was that the particular Spot the Difference task that I designed and used would have been quite a difficult task for the children in their first language as well. In my own work, I showed that even in their first language, the children couldn't necessarily find all the differences easily.
So, that shows that that task, even though it looks simple on paper, that task for that 10-year-old was still quite a difficult task cognitively, not just linguistically, but cognitively as well. So, it wasn't just because they didn't know all the expressions in English that they couldn't get it right. It was also because they didn't understand what the best way, for example, was to search for the differences.
If you've got a big picture with several things happening, then one of the most obvious strategies for searching for differences is to go in a systematic way, to go from left to right or right to left or top to bottom, and then cover everything and then you're not going to miss, hopefully, anything important. But to my surprise, none of the 10-year-old children did this. They kept trying to find differences in different parts of the picture.
And later, when I interviewed them and talked to them, then they were saying, oh, well, yeah, well, I was looking for the kind of places where I thought a difference was more likely, rather than systematically search throughout. That's really interesting. I mean, presumably, that doesn't mean that teachers should necessarily abandon doing communicative tasks altogether then.
I mean, if something like Spot the Difference is very cognitively challenging for kids, but teachers do want to include communicative tasks with them, where do you think teachers can start instead? The research on cognitive strategies would suggest that the first one that emerge and can be encouraged with some scaffolding and lots of practice are memory strategies. Metacognition, so thinking about how you think, thinking about what should I ask, should I ask this first or this first, that kind of metacognition develops later. So, it's perhaps futile to do that with a four-year-old, or you could try, it's not going to hurt, but it's probably not going to lead to much success, whereas memory strategies would be easier.
So, if you say to really young children, let's keep repeating these words and do them this way and this way and forward and backward, they will pick that up and they might do that spontaneously next time they see four or five words. I think that's a really good thing for teachers to think about. Like, maybe the reason a certain activity didn't go very well is because of the children's cognitive development rather than their language level.
I mean, is it useful for teachers to sometimes do what you did research then and ask children to do some of the tasks in their first language as part of their English class? I mean, presumably that's a good way to see if a task should, in theory, work with a certain age group. It is useful for teachers to know what children are able to do in their first language. For example, teachers might think, oh yeah, well, maybe I'll ask them to tell a story.
To tell a story is very difficult. Telling a story is one of those very sophisticated skills to tell a story well so that everyone listens to you and people laugh at the right time and, you know, you refer to the characters correctly and there's no misunderstanding or ambiguity and yet it's a good story with suspense. It's a very difficult task and yet a lot of teachers will say, oh we'll learn this vocabulary, the children cannot tell the story.
Even in their first language, maybe they're learning about things like referencing or how to sequence a story or how to finish a story. I think that's very useful information to a second language teacher.