Pixel International Conferences

Nowadays Second Language Acquisition is one of the most relevant topics in education, in fact teachers and researchers often debate what is the best method to teach an L2. In Italy the general opinion among educators, teachers and parents is that children should be exposed much more to the second language (English) but unfortunately the school hours dedicated to it are no more than three depending on the school grade. Consequently, Italian children are considered slow in acquiring the language despite their bright potential and what emerges is that they are extremely weak in speaking skills. In fact, usually at the end of primary school, after five years of foreign language exposure, they cannot carry on an A1/A2 conversation. What the linguist Noam Chomsky has pointed out is that language acquisition requires two different features, the fact that not only the language is something innate in our brain but also it needs the experience in order to be developed. Having taken the experience as a basis of our experiment we tried to create a new teaching method for children based on the kinaesthetic approach (Dale,E. 1946), which was incorporated through particular body games, and new technology  which was included in the project thanks to an App whose aim was to let primary school children create educational games. In order to verify if the new teaching method is effective and better than the traditional one, we decided to work with a control group of second grade children who followed traditional lessons, and a same age experimental group who followed the experimental program. Both groups were asked to learn two verbal structures “want+noun” and “like+ing and they were trained to work with affirmatives, negatives, interrogatives and short answers. For this reason, the aims of the experiment were to determine which group of children had more difficulties in remembering the verbal structures especially the DO-support ones, and to state if an extra school English course added to the traditional teaching method could help the children to have a better performance than their experimental peers who were just exposed to the experimental method.

Keywords: Second Language acquisition, new technology, kinaesthetic approach;

References:

 
[1] Dale, E.(1946). The cone of experience. Audio-visual methods in teaching,1