Teaching Productive Speaking Skills with Hand Puppets

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,0, University of Paderborn (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: How might the use of hand puppets in primary school affect the productive speaking skills of young learners in an inclusive learning environment? The great potential of acquiring English productive speaking skills frequently remains untapped in English lessons in primary school. What can teacher do to use the outlined learning potentials in terms of the productive speaking skills? Most English primary school books include hand puppets in their concepts and introduce teaching suggestions such as hand puppets as dialogue partners, hand puppet-based games or role plays. This leads to the idea that hand puppets might provide an authentic and meaningful speaking context that promotes productive speaking. The promotion of the speaking skills of young learners is a highly individualized process that needs to be adjusted to the individual development of every single child. Consequently, when providing appropriate occasions for children to talk, teachers need to take the heterogeneity of their student body into consideration, which can be challenging sometimes.