Teaching English to Italian Children: different approaches for different ages

Abstract

This thesis would like to highlight that teaching English to children as a foreign language requires to adopt different approaches according to the progressive cognitive and developmental stages children reach through their first scholastic experience.

In the first chapter I asked myself if Chomsky's Innatist Theory, and especially his theory concerning Universal Grammar, could play any role in children's foreign language (FL) acquisition. Shall they possibly be in anyway facilitated by it in facing the issue of coming across a new language?

In the second chapter I tried to identify different learning situations aimed to the two different age-groups of children of my interest: very young learners (VYL), i.e. children attending play school aged 4 and 5 years old, and young learners (YL), i.e. children attending primary school aged 6 to 11. Actually, within the YL group, a further distinction deserves to be done: children attending the 1st and 2nd year of primary school, i.e. children aged 6 to 8 years old, which are something in between play school children and primary school children, as they still have the same needs VYL actually have, but at the same time they are beginning to develop cognitive abilities proper to older children which differentiate them to the younger ones; and children attending 3rd, 4th and 5th year of primary school, i.e. children aged 8 to 11 years old, which are beginning to develop abstract thinking abilities, so it is only at this time that teachers can begin to take advantage of the "newly-born" children's meta-cognition competence within their teaching. Finally, in the third chapter I will try to make a proposal about some of the activities I had the chance to share with children during my stage at Scuole Pietro Bertolini (Montebelluna, Treviso), aimed both to playschool and to the first two years of primary school. In regards to the last three years, the school kindly helped me to collect a mini-corpus of texts children wrote in English (actually, we cannot properly talk about spontaneous writing, but of brief guided exercises), with the aim to identify how children write in English, the new language they are just beginning to get in touch with.