Teacher Discussion Forums

Suppose a child starts learning English at the age of 8 at a state school, would you consider it far-fetched if "learning" concentrated mostly on speaking and listening activities, different sorts of games, role-playing, drawing and colouring activities, etc instead of writing and reading? Most books we have to use include a great of reading and writing tasks, which is absolutely boring. I usually find things to do in class from other books or the internet or simply sit down, think and "invent" something appropriate. A lot of colleagues insist that there's nothing wrong with introducing reading and writing from the first week since children can read and write in L1 so they don't have to spend much time with tracing, for example. I don't disagree but I see that they're happier (at least in my class) with a little writing, a lot of teacher story telling or narrating and lots of different activities no matter if that's simply "go to board and draw a line". There is a certificate craze in this country and parents as well as private FL schools tend to prepare children to take their Cambridge FCE at the age of 12-13, which is absurd as far as I'm concerned...
It was my first year with 8-year-olds and I'm not quite sure yet about the role of reading + writing at this level. It's this other problem, too; parents think we're not doing much at school because I don't usually give them writing tasks for homework and I don't ask them to learn how to read these particularly lengthy dialogues in our coursebook. Oh well...

Liliana--

I don't have a direct answer to your question, but I do know that 8-year olds (3rd graders) are usually reading at a low-intermediate level. In English some people call this the "within-word pattern" stage. Students at this stage should be learning how to write paragraphs and read short chapter books. They are just past the phase of reading by pointing thier finger at every word.

That is where they should be in their native language. I would expect your students to be behind in English (if this is their first year of study); however, they should be able to move at a faster pace since they already know how to read. I'd guess that the main obstacle for them is simply vocabulary.

As far as more useful advice, I'm not sure what to tell you.