Making the Match: Traditional Nursery Rhymes and Teaching English to Modern Children

• Main Author: Danijela Prosic-Santova
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: CLELEjournal 2015-05-01
• Series: CLELEjournal
• Subjects: Mother Goose nursery rhymes; teaching English to young learners; very young learners; selection criteria; rhyme content; illustrations; second-language learning
• Online Access: http://clelejournal.org/making-the-match-traditional-nursery-rhymes-and-teaching-english-to-modern-children/

Nursery rhymes have been used in teaching English to children for a long time and for a variety of reasons, including linguistic, cognitive, affective, and cultural ones. However, because many rhymes were created more than a hundred years ago, when society cherished somewhat different values from those in the modern day, care should be exercised when choosing the rhymes to be used in teaching modern-day children. The article argues for and develops criteria that can help teachers of young and very young learners select the rhymes suitable for language instruction in terms of their content, accompanying illustrations and language. Thus, rhymes need to be considered from the point of view of the relevance of their content to the children’s world and their age appropriateness, and whether they provide material for encouragement of discussion and exploration of values, as well as the means for overcoming a variety of problems children may encounter in their daily lives. Accompanying illustrations should also be observed concerning the representation of characters, the settings and activities they engage in, as well as the synchronization of illustrations with the text. Finally, the criteria for choosing from the linguistic point of view should include selecting the rhymes based on the appropriate level of the language used, the rhymes’ language learning potential, and their potential for development of activities around the rhyme.