Dear colleagues

MORE! has been written for students going through a period of significant change in their lives: the transition from children to teenagers. As they get older, children develop an interest in real-world topics, leaving behind the fantasies of childhood.

The time this takes differs from child to child which is why students seem to swing between being teenagers and children for quite some time: showing interest in more mature and realistic content one day, but dropping back into childlike behaviour, attitudes and interests another.

When choosing the content of MORE!, we were aware of these challenges, and in order to make the content psychologically relevant for the students, created more ‘imaginative’ content in levels 1 and 2, and more ‘realistic’ content in levels 3 and 4. However, as mentioned above, we also took into account the fact that the transition period between childhood and adolescence is blurred and not clear-cut. Therefore, the content of the lower two levels is not totally ‘imaginative’, while the texts and topics in the upper two levels are not exclusively ‘realistic’.

The more ‘teenage’ our students become, the more challenging it can be to teach them. All of a sudden students want to be ‘cool’, and the content that they loved only a short while ago now seems childish. Psychologists stress that in this phase of their lives, students are faced with the difficult challenge of developing their identities. It is the teacher’s task to support students in exploring their own capabilities and strengthening their self-esteem and developing positive beliefs about themselves. They are also called upon to make students aware of their own learning progress and their foreign language competencies. If the classroom culture allows this, students are less likely to develop self-doubt and negative beliefs about their language-learning capabilities.

In MORE!, this is achieved in the following ways:

• it aims to establish a ‘can do’ learning culture
• it offers a teaching programme based on human values
• the course gives teachers and students a balance of classroom interaction and individual language training
• it offers a mixture of fun and more ‘serious’ topics and texts

We hope that you agree that MORE! is the right course for your students too!

 

With best wishes,

Herbert Putcha & Jeff Stranks