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If you are a young learners’ English teacher students aged 6-10, what kind of course material you should choose for your class? The answer to this question can be very important to those tutors who have to choose the course material by themselves and are not provided by the school. In this article I will share my knowledge and experience about two course materials I use. It would be suitable for students’ aged 6-10. 1- Course material for the engage phase: I introduce “Easy English” course books level 3 (ISBN 978-88-536-0440-8) and level 5 (ISBN 978-88-536-0442-2) for the engage phase. In these books, which come with their audio CDs, you can find many ideas for this phase. You can use their pictures, audios and most important, the ideas to create your lesson plan. You just need to adapt each lesson to your class. May be you need to add some pictures to make it more attractive and fun. This is an example to give a clear image: in level 3, page 18 the lesson is about wild animals. Students can see some wild animals’ pictures and names and should match them together. After matching, you can add something more ideas to it in order to make your students think and speak in English: • what does each of those animals eat? • Where does each of those animals live? It can even be more attractive if you provide the pictures of their food and habitats and use matching method for those, too. As you can see, in this way, you have based your lesson plan on the book and extent it with your own ideas. 2- Study Phase: For study phase, I recommend the series of “Family and friends”. This series is published by Oxford university and has 7 levels: starter to level 6. Each level comes with: • Class Book and MultiROM Pack • Workbook • Workbook and Online Practice • Teacher’s Book Plus • Teacher’s Resource Pack • Class Audio CDs • Classroom Presentation Tool This is level6 ISBN: 978-0-19-480834-7 and you can find the whole series on Oxford university website: elt.oup.com. Each level covers all aspects of teaching English: speaking, reading, phonics, grammar, listening, writing, vocabulary, ... Fortunately, the lessons in the book have the advantage of giving the main idea and also their outline is very educational. The grammar rules are represented in a very brief and simple way and can be used directly. It helps to keep the time of teacher’s explanations, low. On the other hand, you need to play your role, as a young learner teacher, to adapt this course to ESA methodology. What I mean is you always need to add more exercises, pictures and practices to it. And you definitely need to create your own worksheet for each lesson. You need to replace some pictures with better ones since some of them are not good enough to be recognized. Pictures of raisin and fig are some examples. Also there are some extensive reading lessons which contain long texts with too many new words for that level. Covering these readings in the classroom is not recommended since takes too much time and makes students exhausted with learning too many words. I divide these readings into two categories: I assign those with less vocabulary for homework and skip the second category. I have used all levels of both aforementioned course materials for young learners from Asia and Europe. The advantages of both courses overweigh the disadvantages with the help of ESA methodology. They don’t provide you scenarios for activity phase and you should look somewhere else for it.
