During PIGATE's online gathering on Saturday, Aug. 14, 2021, participants explained (showed, and told of) a number of their favorite resources and practical techniques for exploiting songs and stories with language learners. Participants' accounts related to various activities with preschool children and early school-aged (elementary and junior high school) English-as-an-additional language learners in particular.
To those inspiring accounts, which I hope you can review via Zoom meeting recordings, chat transcripts, and other short reports about PIGATE's August gathering, I'd like to add a pointer to a separate webinar recording. That webinar, from the iDTi 2015 Summer Intensive for Teachers, is about ways of developing learners' phonemic awareness, "necessary prerequisites for studying and reading in English" (idDTi Videos, 2021.08.12, description, ¶2).
About 18 minutes into that webinar recording, Karen Frazier Tsai asserted:
"[W]e need to start first with making our children phonemically aware of the sounds in English, those sounds that are different from whatever their first language is."
(auto-generated YouTube video transcript, 17:23–17:35)
She then asked and answered the questions: "[W]hat do we do; how do we start … to make them have that skill of really focusing in on the sounds" (transcript, 18:21–18:28, ff.). In sum, Tsai explained various ways of helping learners become aware of sounds, rhymes, and syllables by playing with words in a new language. Whether you're teaching pre-reading to young learners, or simply reading stories to children, I highly recommend watching the webinar recording from beginning to end!
Reference
iTDi Videos. (2021.08.12). Children Playing with Words (Karen Frazier Tsai) [video recording]. https://youtu.be/Br10cHS-5Qk
