The method on which this activity could be based is both communicative and ludic, deriving from the "learning by doing" principle. We have told in the previous passages that to children origami is an highly motivating activity that has to be lived as a concrete creating experience in which to be involved in a practical way, now it is time to ask ourselves which is the way origami does help language learning. As it is activity based, this kind of approach becomes, in the Fl teaching, a basic condition that justifies the use of a language different from L1 in a non-natural context as the English classroom is. Origami provides, indeed, an effective contextable to stimulate the global communicative skills in an affective way: thinking, creating, speaking, playing, discovering other cultures, to satisfy curiosities and phantasies, all this starting from emotions to create the motivation.
In the FL classroom origami allows to:
- create concrete communicative situations;
- use the language in a comunicative way;
- stimulate an appropriate production through group interaction;
- drill different structures;
- exercise the four skills;
- let disabled and special educational nneds children participate creatively.
Learners, while creating origami, are involved in operative activities in which language comes up as a means, more than as an end itself. It seems to be unrealistic to expect the children to speak in English all the time they are working, though, while folding paper into origami it is useful to encourage them to use phrases that could be functional in that specific situation: Do you like it? -How can I fold it? - Help me.- Can I have some paper? - I prefer yellow paper.- This is my lion.- ... The folding activities, furthermore, can be used and adapted to practise the skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing.
We can use origami to stimulate communication expecially in the case of disabled and special educational need children towards a notional-functional perspective also for them.
The functions explored could be:
personal- as aid to appropriate of his own corporeal self while folding;
interpersonal- asking for help, likes and dislikes, chatting while folding;
instrumental- following instructions and giving information about the procedures;
referential- description of the environment, the stages of the procedures;
poetic- some children enjoy very much inventing rhymes and nonsenses using as springboard the characters folded;
metalinguistic- children often ask help from the teacher to give them linguistic tools such as translation of the origami symbols or try in authonomy to understand the meaning of the instructions from the whole context.
EFL in the primary is, therefore, to be considered as a didactic path in which we must make the best of, besides the verbal skills, the mime and gestual languages, the ludic activities, the graphical-figurative expression created by the use of origami and other paper folding activities.In this way L2 can be harmonized in a educational process in which coexist cognitive and affective aspects, practical attitudes a symbolic elaboration of a new communicative code.

.:: ORIGAMI INDEX ::.
.:: ORIGAMI IS AN ART :: HOW ORIGAMI WORKS ::.
.:: ORIGAMI TEACHING :: LEARNING TO LEARN ::.
:: ORIGAMI IN THE FL CLASSROOM ::.
.:: TOPIC BASED APPROACH :: TASK BASED APPROACH ::.