My top 10 books for/ about EFL for young learners
Wrote this list for a (teacher training) student and thought it might be worth a blog post and maybe a bit of friendly debate. Here are my all time favourites- off the top of my head, but if they’re that great they should be at the top of my head after all:
1. Puzzle Time for Starters/ Movers/ Flyers (Delta Publishing) – great photocopiable books, tied to Cambridge Young Learner exams but suitable for any class between 5 ½ and 13
2. Teaching Young Language Learners- Annamaria Pinter
3. OABC (Oxford Activity Books for Children)- textbook- very easily photocopied as black and white, great for reading and writing and easily adaptable to make pairwork tasks. Old, but a classic
4. Let’s Go (just the songs, plus maybe the flashcards, but the actual textbooks are nothing special)
5. Children’s Games (Macmillan)
6. Children Learning English – Jayne Moon
7. Very Young Learners- Vanessa Reilly
8. Oxford Basics for Children (series of books for teachers)
9. Cookie and Friends
10. Primary Pronunciation/ Vocabulary/ Grammar Box (Cambridge University Press)- a bit dry, but still useful as it covers stuff other books don’t
January 9th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Thanks for the list, Alex. BTW, TESOL are running a free online course on teaching young learners…
http://evosessions.pbwiki.com/Interactive_Activities
You have to sign up pretty sharpish if you’re interested in participating.
January 10th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Primary Communication Box I’ve found to my liking quite a bit as well…
January 10th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Nice list, and very useful too. It’s been awhile since I’ve taught kids but I know some of these. I always like the Oxford Basics series, they’re cheap and good books and often require little materials, copying etc.
The Jayne Moon book is good for theory and some ideas but isn’t exactly the most activity-filled practical book. Can I recommend a newer one from Macmillan, it’s called 500 Activities for the Primary classroom and it’s just that. Plus it has rationales and bits of bite-sized theory to complete the package. I’ve used it on guest visits to my sons’ English classes – great stuff!
January 14th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Thanks for the recommendation, I don’t know if we’ve got it in the teachers’ room, but will look out for it come Mar when I have kids again.
Writing that made me think that the number of books for young learners I know is fairly small, especially if you discount the ones I hate (Cambridge English for Schools). So I picked up a copy of Teaching Languages to Young Learners by Lynne Cameron. Good idea, adding some theory to what we do with young learners, but when she spent 10 pages explaining that we should challenge students just enough (not too little and not too much, that is), I lost interest and gave up.