(1907) NATURAL LANGUAGE TEACHING METHOD IN PRE-SCHOOL EDUCATION

摘要

Readiness to learn to read must be shaped at the level of pre-school education. One of the innovativemethods of teaching pre-school children to read is the Natural language teaching method developedby Wenda Pye. The programme consists in the teaching of listening, speaking, reading and writingusing games and creative activities. The learning process is accompanied by children's creativeactivity. Therefore, the natural language teaching method is perceived not only as the process oflanguage learning but also, and most importantly, as educating through language, where language isboth a means of communication and a thinking tool.The concept is based on the belief that child's language is a specific phenomenon determined, on theone hand, by natural child development and, on the other hand, by child's interactions with theenvironment. Consequently, child's language education should be enhanced by a subtle help from anadult, who - by the use of provocation, arrangement and gentle encouragement to take actions -opens up a new, unknown space to the child, i.e. the world of writing. Language plays a role of a factorthat integrates various fields of knowledge and different types of child's activity in reality perceptionand acquisition. Natural situations used in the teaching of reading, which create occasionaleducational situations, inspire the child and simultaneously introduce him into the world of writing.Thus, learning to read should be accompanied by learning to write. The discovery of new values thatthe novel language of signs has with regards to information acquisition increases child's motivation toverbalise his own thoughts and to learn to read and write. Emotional engagement facilitatesmemorizing a story or new vocabulary. It sensitizes the child to the graphical, phonological andsemantic dimension of a given word by making a direct link between the graphical representation andthe sound.A point of departure for natural language teaching is a short and simple text and illustrations thathighly relate to it. Texts form stories included in little books entitled "Sunshine library". There is aseries of 40 books designed for pre-school children self-study of reading. The books are graded atfour levels of difficulty. Didactic aids used in the series are very well organised and introduce alreadyconsolidated semantic structures, providing new contents regarding language competence at a slowpace. Each book is composed of three stories. Typically, the first story includes one text with carefullyselected new language structures. The following two stories serve the purpose of materialconsolidation. The essence of the books are pictures, which should be in line with the text because thebasis of reading is to associate an image with its graphical representation. The print used in the booksis large, legible, the words are clearly separated, and every sentence starts with a new line. Thestories are simple and presented with repetitive sentence patterns.Natural language teaching develops and deepens child's natural willingness to speak, read or drawgraphical symbols. Speech is here not only the foundation of child's expression and learning to readand write, but also a support for child's paralanguage activity.The article presents the use of the natural language teaching method in pre-school children education.