Although we were all very excited at the prospect of creating our own material, and the prospect of testing language learning at nursery level, we did indeed need to carefully consider if these things were actually possible.
Firstly, we got in touch with several teaching professionals, a classroom assistant, a primary school teacher and a nursery nurse in order to find out their own personal opinions about how languages are currently being taught.
From these interviews, we determined that although not impossible, nursery was perhaps not the opportune stage at which to introduce a second language. Therefore, we revised our plans in order to appeal to the early stages of primary school, with a target audience of ages 4-7.
In regards to the feasibility of creating our own material, we realised that creating our own children’s story and nursery rhymes was a rather tall order given the time restraints of our project. We would have to rethink our approach!
Instead, I researched the feasibility of translating an existing children’s book. Has it been done before? Could the rhyme element and semantic meaning both be transferred simultaneously? Were there any good examples of these books?
In doing this, I found that translations of well known and loved English children’s stories have been done before. For example, several of Julia Donaldson’s novels have now been translated into French, most famously “The Gruffalo”. The bestselling children’s book, written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler, has sold more than 10.5 million copies worldwide!
Whilst looking into this, I came across an amazing find! A 30 year old teacher Laura, who although born and raised in France is of British origin and is a primary school teacher in Switzerland, has started a blog, a lot of which revolves around her own experiences of teaching young children. Her blog gives details of a class she took on “The Gruffalo”, which seemed to be extremely successful. Her method was to read the book first in English, and due to the illustrations it seems that the children picked up the meaning of the story rather well. She then proceeded to read the book in French, their native language.
It seemed to me as though doing something like this, but flipping it round so that in Scottish classrooms we read the French first and then finish off by reading the English, may prove to be rather effective. Laura’s class consisted of 22 5-6 year old, 17 of which were boys, and her lesson was a great success. This shows that perhaps 5-6 is an opportune age at which to begin introducing children to foreign languages, as long as the material is child friendly enough.
We personally thought that rather than attempting our own translation of a children’s book, it would be more productive to use a professional translation of one that has already been done. That way we know that the translation is accurate and the material is indeed suitable for our intended age group.
From the examples we found in Laura’s blog, the link to which I will provide below, we decided that “The Gruffalo” would be the centre focus of our proposed lesson plan. What better way to spark an interest from children than by using characters and stories that they already know and love.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you The Gruffalo!
Here is the link for Laura’s blog that I mentioned above:
Laura's Blog
Please take a look at her fantastic work using “The Gruffalo” in a class.
I also found videos of "The Gruffalo" in French that are worth a watch, even though they eventually didn't make it into our finalised lesson plan:
Le Gruffalo
This was probably the most fun aspect of the project for me so far; as I was able delve into the world of "The Gruffalo" and what made it even better was that it was in French and was perfect for the direction our project was going in.
The next blog update will be aimed at the further research we did regarding the information we received from Glasgow City Council’s Executive Director of Education in order to aid our work.
Please read about it below!
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