The ability to show animations synchronised to sound and text has a lot of potential for creating interactive ESL reading resources for young children under 8.

There are even some advantages over reading together with a parent (but please don’t stop reading with your child):

• The child can control the pace of the story.
• The child can choose to review parts that catch his or her imagination.
• The animations are timed to match the words giving children more clues as to the meaning of the words.
• In an ESL setting, the interactive resources provide audio spoken by a native speaker.

In addition, the technology that makes this sort of story possible can also be used to make fun, interactive games and activities.

The programmed interaction between child and website is non-intimidating because of its limited scope. This can be an effective way of easing a child in to a second language.

In a real language class, teachers construct a lot of activities that are, in essence, about limiting the range of possibilities to a narrow and secure range of vocabulary:

• Games are frameworks where students can interact in the language they are learning without worrying about making a big mistake.
• Textbooks and activity books focus on one small aspect of the language.
• Class activities provide teachers the opportunity to limit or define the range of language used by showing a narrow set of examples.

Interactive games and activities similarly limit the scope of an activity by giving children a secure set of options.

When produces as a themed group, interactive stories and games provide the sort of varied and rich activities that many children respond to. Children are able to progress from receiving the language, through the story, to using or working with the language, in a game. While this is by no means all there is to learn, it does cover important beginning steps.

Over the next few days, I would like to review some of the best interactive language learning sites for children under 8 years old: sites that provide resources that will readily capture a child’s imagination while instructing.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 9:48 pm and is filed under English, EFL, ESL, Children's English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.