USING PUPPETS FOR TEACHING
• Two fluent English speakers in class are better than just one.
Puppets introduce another proficient English speaker into the classroom for the teacher to speak to. This is important, as one natural language learning strategy adopted by children is that of observing and then imitating conversations conducted by the people around them. Small children can often be heard rehearsing dialogues with their toys. The puppet allows this 3 dimensional dialogue modelling to take place in the classroom. For example, imagine that the teacher wishes to demonstrate how to ask for a coloured pencil in English. She places a red pencil and a blue pencil to the right of the puppet ( Out of reach of her left hand to neccessitate the pencil being passed to her by the puppet) , then turns to him and has the following dialogue:
Teacher “Homer, can I have a pencil please?
Puppet “Yes, what colour?”
Teacher “Red please”
Puppet (Handing “Here you are”
over pencil)
Teacher “Thank you”
The pencils are then placed on the far left of the teacher and the roles are reversed. Homer asks for the pencil and the teacher passes it to him. After modelling the dialogue again the teacher invites a child to come to the front and take one of the roles, whilst the teacher speaks for the puppet.
In my experience, young children are very keen to do this. They rarely experience performance anxiety and any embarrassment they do have is greatly reduced by the fact that they view the puppet as a being half way between the teacher and themselves.
• Puppets help create a genuine information gap
A key tennet of the communicative approach to language teaching is that genuine communication involves a purpose such as giving someone information or getting them to do something. Real communication centres on an information gap for when we genuinely communicate we usually do not know everything that the speaker is going to say. We may be able to predict a percentage of what they will say, but there will always be attitudinal information that is new to us. This “genuine information gap” is difficult to create in a classroom of elementary learners who have worked together for a period of time because
a) the students have discovered a lot about each other through observation and through conversations in their mother tongue
b) the students have a limited number of patterns and lexical sets at their disposal restricitng topic variety.
Therefore, an alternative to asking for and giving personal information about classroom members is to get the students to exchange information about their puppets as the puppets can come from anywhere in the world, have any name their creator wishes and have a whole gambit of likes, dislikes and hobbies.
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