Very Young Learners is a resource book full of ideas, activities, information, and advice addressed mainly to nursery teachers, dealing with children aged 3 to 6 years and the hard but unique work of teaching English as a Foreign Language to this age group.

Before starting to talk more deeply about this book, let me say a few words on the series Resource Books for Teachers. This series is intended to provide teachers with a guide to practice in relation to the central aspects of Language Teaching and presents important current issues in several areas: Very Young Learners is one of the most recently published titles within this series: moreover, in my opinion, it is one of the most interesting.

This book shares the format and the overall structure of the others in the series: an introduction presents the focus area and this is followed by plenty of examples of practical activities based on sound educational principles and discussion of actual classroom materials and techniques.

The authors are an experienced teacher and a teacher trainer drawing their information from an ample panorama of shared knowledge about very young learners, nursery schools and the characteristics of these early stage children. Using this wide experience and expertise, they have outlined and produced an interesting basic guide that could be regarded as a valid and useful reference for all EFL professional teachers engaged in the nursery field.

Very Young Learners can be considered a powerful tool for those who are new in the teaching profession, above all for those who are beginning to experiment with the fascinating challenge of nursery classes. For this reason it is suitable both for pre-service training and as an in-service resource with plenty of ready-made activities and photo-copiable materials.

Admittedly, this could be also considered a weakness, because a book like this, full of ideas and hints, often does not stimulate the teacher’s creativity. However, on the whole, as regards Very Young Learners, this fear can be answered simply by looking at the content of the book, which is easy to exploit and to implement developing the teacher’s daily interaction.

Very Young Learners consists of six chapters each of which covers one topic: The creative classroom, Basic language activities, All about me, Number Colour and shape, The world around us, Festivals. Within these sections the organisation is virtually standard and could be considered an outline plan following the development of children and merging activities with their interests. The main aim is to follow their growth for the cognitive, socio-affective and physical point of view from the earlier egocentric stages toward autonomy, from self-perception to the discovery of the world around them and, lastly, from an holistic perception of language to the development of linguistic skills.

Although each chapter, contains different activities the structure as a whole is coherent, being organised in a network of tasks that belong to a specific area, but that can be used and adapted to the teacher’s needs.

The frame of each activity is as follows:

Very useful suggestions and practical information on the theoretical background of each activity are given in the Introduction and in the "How to use this book " section. These are then integrated in the format of each activity.

This book is particularly attractive because it exploits techniques and approaches that show a deep respect for the maturing abilities of children, and at the same time gives teachers procedures to accomplish educational aims as well as an active use of the target language.

For example the authors lead the readers step by step in the use of techniques such as games, storytelling, rhymes and chants, and, last but not least, role-play and mime in an effective manner. Activities vary from a range of well-known (for instance "Simon Says"p.44, "Twinkle twinkle little star" p.137), to more new though traditional (for instance the adaptation of the shadow-play theatre in the "Creative Class" section p.19). Art and craft activities are the starting point of the "Creative classroom", that is built together using raw materials, recycling paper, old things and so on. Personally I find some activities too traditional, but clearly the authors cannot cater to every taste.

The amount of photo-copiable material is quite considerable: 30 pages. But the bulk of ready-to-use material is in the form of songs and new texts accompany traditional tunes (for example "Ten little teddy bears" from the song "Ten little Indians").

At the end of the book teachers can find an exhaustive "Further reading" section giving advice about resources, storybooks, songs and rhymes, cassettes, arts and crafts, posters, videos and mail order addresses to access all these resources and even more from abroad.

On the whole it is and should be addressed as one of the most complete and helpful books for nursery level teachers. A feeling that passes through the activities proposed is certainly the sound knowledge of the children’s world: this leads to a model of positive classroom management in which the organisation and duration of the activities is given, but there is also enough space to the teacher’s inventiveness and creativity.

REVIEWS

A Teacher training experience at NILE IPG97