Primary Language Education: Songs, Storybooks, and Spanish Curriculum

Songs, Rhymes, and Chants for Language Learning

Children love songs, rhymes, and chants. Their repetitive nature and rhythm make them an ideal vehicle for language learning. Their usefulness is recognized by their inclusion in most language programs, and every primary school teacher will have their favorites.

Why Use Songs, Rhymes, and Chants?

This list of benefits for language learning has been grouped together under the main objectives of most language teaching programs:

• A linguistic resource.
• A psychological/affective resource.
• A cognitive resource.
• A cultural resource.
• A social resource.

Pronunciation Benefits

Songs, rhymes, and chants are particularly useful for practicing pronunciation. This includes individual sounds and sounds in connected speech, but, more importantly, features relating to stress, rhythm, and intonation.

When and How to Use Songs, Rhymes, and Chants

Songs, rhymes, and chants can be used in many different ways:

• As warm-ups
• As a transition from one activity to the next
• As closers
• To introduce new language
• To practice language
• To revise language
• To change the mood
• To get everyone's attention
• To channel high levels of energy
• To integrate with storytelling, topic work, or cross-curricular work

Adapting Songs, Rhymes, and Chants

Many songs, rhymes, or chants can be easily adapted by changing key words to fit in with a particular story or theme. The advantage of this is that children may already be familiar with the song, rhyme, or chant.

Building a Repertoire of Songs, Rhymes, and Chants

To develop a wide range of songs, rhymes, and chants that are suitable for the age group(s) you teach and the context in which you work, you may like to build up a record in the following way. This will help you analyze the full potential of each song, rhyme, and chant.

Storybooks in Language Education

Why Use Stories?

Children enjoy listening to stories in their L1 and understand the conventions of narrative. Here are some further reasons why teachers use storybooks:

1. Stories are motivating, challenging, and fun, and can help develop positive attitudes. They can create a desire to continue learning.
2. Children can become personally involved in a story as they identify with the characters and try to interpret the narrative and illustrations. This helps develop their own creative powers.
3. Linking fantasy and imagination with the child's real world, they provide a way of enabling children to make sense of their everyday life and forge links between home and school.
4. Listening to stories in class is a social experience.
5. Listening to stories helps children become aware of the rhythm, intonation, and pronunciation of language.
6. Storybooks provide ideal opportunities for presenting cultural information.

Curricular Design in the Spanish Context

A General Framework

1. Language as Communication: Language is conceived as a dynamic phenomenon, not simply as a system of forms, structures, and words, but basically as a system of communicative acts and situations.
2. Communicative Competence: The concept of proficiency underlying:
   1. Linguistic or grammatical competence
   2. Sociolinguistic or pragmatic competence
   3. Sociocultural competence
   4. Discourse competence
   5. Strategic competence
3. The Role of the L1: The mother language is not considered an obstacle to learning the foreign language that causes interference, but a useful resource at the learner’s disposal that aids learning. The L1 is a resource of knowledge which learners will use both consciously.
4. The Importance of Contextualization and Discourse: Traditionally, the FL elements were frequently presented in isolation, with little or no social context, in separate sentences which did not form a complete discourse.
5. The Learner-Centered Curriculum.
6. Autonomous Learning: In this long process, it is vital to promote learning strategies that help students to learn how to learn, learn autonomously, control, and become responsible for their own learning.
7. Cooperative Learning.