Theme-based Teaching

Theme-based teaching is an approach that provides the opportunity of dealing with different activities linked together by content. The theme connects everything you are going to work with. Surely, it is very demanding on teachers because when planning a good theme-based lesson plan, they must know about the cognitive development of children, the language they know and the way that language develops and the form motor skill development occurs at the ages the teacher in contact with.Theme-based teaching is also known as topic-based teaching or content-based teaching. The most profitable aspect in this approach is that it can be related to all the areas in the school curriculum. In consequence, as students are going to be using real language to talk about topic probably they already know something about; the approach is going to turn out to be absolutely communicative and meaningful.The language learning of children is likely to revolve around chunks of discourse learnt from talk, stories and songs, vocabulary development, and some aspects of grammatical knowledge, together with elementary literacy skills. Early foreign language learning can be much more “organic” developing from partial to more complete knowledge by building links and connections in the networks of children’s language resources.The planning is on-line, that is, it should be really flexible and open. Two basic planning tools for theme-based teaching are brainstorming and webs. In the first case, it is highly recommendable to take into consideration the following clues: find a theme and find the contents (people, objects, actions, processes, typical events and places) An alternative planning procedure is to build up web linking activities to areas of the school curriculum: Maths, Technology, etc., thus extending a mere lesson plan to a possible project work. Themes can include different aspects of the same topic requiring different types of discourse -graphs, charts, reports and commentaries-.