A two-day training package (10 contact hours) aims give teachers background knowledge and practice in the skills needed to confidently deliver simple lessons and activities to young English language learners. Teachers and students will receive ongoing support, easy to follow lesson plans with songs each week, posters for their classrooms and flashcards.

The goal of the training is to get participants involved and have an understanding that there are systematic relationships between letters and sounds in English that don’t follow the direct relationship of Finnish. Training will include learning and practicing of activities and games that lead to key emergent language skills, including oral sounds for pre reading and sequencing, phonemic awareness, encoding and decoding.

Background

The new National Core Curriculum for Finland states that language education should be playful, creative and joyful: “Kielten opiskelussa on runsaasti sijaa ilolle, leikillisyydelle ja luovuudelle” (OPS, 2014: 127). As foreign languages are introduced into the first and second grades this workshop offers training to teachers in key early literacy skills for multi-sensory English teaching. The sounds and written representations of English outnumber those in Finnish, yet they are not included in all teacher training or textbooks. In-service training for Grade 2 teachers in Vantaa has further highlighted the need to tackle that gap. It is important that teachers develop a good working knowledge of the sound system of English. It is also important that teachers focus on English sounds first as special care should be taken to introduce written English to young learners due to the less regular orthographic system. Reading weaknesses in this area can lead to later reading deficits for English and initial research shows that including sound to letter relationships in teaching English a second language can improve emergent literacy skills.

By who The project co-ordinator is heritage language teacher Jeff Pilgram. The project also incorporates a research aspect in which students progress would be monitored and teachers can give feedback at intervals through the year. From the University of Jyväskylä the project will be supported by Professor Heikki Lyytinen, currently UNESCO Chair for Inclusive Literacy for All, and Professor Ulla Richardson, specialist in psycholinguistics, phonetics and neurolinguistics. Both Professor Lyttinen and Professor Richardson developed GraphoGame (Ekapeli) which would be incorporated into the project.