Classroom management as a component of primary school English teacher professional training

Abstract

The article is focused on professional skills training for primary school English teachers within English Classroom Management, a new course on the undergraduate program Foreign Language Teaching (Early Foreign Language Teaching), field of study Pedagogical Education. The traditional course Foreign Language Teaching Methods does not pay enough attention to such important questions as dealing with discipline, lesson planning and using different formats of communication between students and between students and the teacher. The new course raises the problem of native and foreign language usage when teaching young learners, which is of special interest for both teachers and teacher interns. The article deals with the specifics of young learners’ and the teacher’s speech at a primary school English lesson. The article analyses the ways of introducing and carrying out instructions which are necessary for the teacher to manage an English class, as well as the phrases needed by the learners and available to the their level to communicate in English during the lesson. Special attention is paid to the problems of control and error correction in children’s writing and oral speech. The components important in the training of primary school English teachers include methodologically justified and effective use of technology, use of different approaches in organizing students’ work during the class (such as pair and group work, open class activities and individual work during the lesson), the ways to implement such approaches, the ways of effective learning , and consideration of psychological traits of young learners.