16 The role of imagination WORKING WITH YOUNG LANGUAGE LEARNERS shops. The cards and maps they were using had been clipped together with a paper clip. One pair proceeded to “drive’ the paper clip round the map each time they traced the route. They made appropriate cornering noises as they turned left or right, and reversed with much vocal squealing of brakes when they went wrong! The teacher's first reaction was to tell them not to be silly. Second thoughts suggested that by translating understanding into physical reaction they had thought up a much more powerful way of giving meaning to the phrases ‘turn left/turn right, take the second turning on the left/right’ ete, than the teacher could have created. It was also powerful because they had thought of it for themselves. In this way, through their sense of fun and play, the children are living the language for real. Yet again we can see why games have such a central role to play. But games are not the only way in which individual personalities surface in the language classroom, There is also the whole area of imaginative thinking. Children delight in imagination and fantasy. It is more than simply a matter of enjoyment, however. In the primary school, children are very busing making sense of the world about them. They are identifying pattern and also deviation from that pattern. They test out their versions of the world through fantasy and confirm how the world actually is by imagining how it might be different. In the language classroom this capacity for fantasy and imagination has a very constructive part to play. Language teaching should be concerned with real life. But it would be a great pity if we were so concerned to promote reality in the classroom that we forgot that reality for children includes imagination and fantasy. The act of fantasising, of imagining, is very much an authentic part of being a child. So, for example, describing an imaginary monster with five legs, ten pink eyes and a very long tongue may not involve actual combinations of words that they would use about things in real life, but recombining familiar words and ideas to create a monster is a very normal part of a child’s life. Similarly, claiming a dinosaur in a list of pets is hardly real in purist terms but perfectly normal for a nine year old with a sense of the absurd. Children’s books reflect this kind of fantasising with titles such as The Tiger Who Came To Tea or The Giant Jam Sandwich If we accept the role of the imagination in children’s lives we can see that it provides another very powerful stimulus for real language use. We need to find ways of building on this factor in the language classroom too. We want to stimulate the children’s creative imagination so that they want to use the language to share their ideas. For example, they can draw and describe the monster that lives down the hole on the next page. What does it eat? What does it look like? How old is it? (A chance at last to use numbers above eleven!) They will no doubt want to tell their friends about the monster they have drawn, Children like talking.TEACHING ENGLISH IN THE PRIMARY CLASSROOM 1.6 The instinct for interaction and talk Of all the instincts and attributes that children bring to the classroom this is probably the most important for the language teacher. It is also the most obvious, so there is no need to labour the point. Let us just say that this * particular capacity can surface unbidden and sometimes unwanted in all classrooms. Its persistence and strength is very much to our advantage in the primary language classroom. It is one of the most powerful motivators for using the language. We are fortunate as language teachers that we can build on it. Even so, you will sometimes hear teachers object — ‘But I can’t do paitwork with this class. They will keep talking to each other!” Far from being a good reason for not doing pairwork with them, this is a very good reason why we should. Children need to talk, Without talking they cannot become good at talking, They can learn about the language, but the only way to learn to use it is to use it. So our job is to make sure that the desire to talk is working for learning not against learning, Practical Activities I gives detailed activities which do just this. This chapter has identified some of the skills and instincts a young child brings to learning a foreign language at school. By saying we wish to build on these we are already beginning to describe the language classroom we want to see and the kind of things we want to do. In other words, our goals and priorities are beginning to emerge. The next chapter looks at those goals and priorities in more detail and explores their practical implications.