The School Tool

While most children have a decent level of communicative English by the time they start school, the classroom is where they will hone their native language skills, taking on board all aspects of their mother tongue, such as sentence structure, grammar and punctuation.

Indeed, their aptitude in English will underpin their success in many other subject areas, from History and Geography, to Science and French. Children's ability to read and write to a high standard in English is crucial, so teachers must know how to use all the resources available to them to help guide their pupils on the road to English mastery.

In any 21st century classroom, technology will play a pivotal part in the learning process, and digital tools ' both online and offline - can help make English a more fun and interactive subject to learn.

  Interactive whiteboards (IWBs) are becoming increasingly popular in schools, with an estimated one in seven classrooms around the globe having one by 2011. The multimedia boards enable real-time collaboration between the teacher and pupils, who can submit their ideas for the whole class to see immediately, with personal handsets called learner response systems (LRS).

Ideas can be brainstormed, sentence structures can be discussed and teachers can even show documentary clips, presentations and anything else relating to improving the young learners' English language skills.

Games can also help teachers engage with their pupils. Tag team writing, for example, is a good way of involving everyone in writing exercises, and short stories can be written collaboratively by everyone in the class.

Given that IWBs are multimedia enabled, they are the perfect platform for young students not only to build their written skills, but speaking and reading too, with recorded-assisted reading and partner reading techniques proving to be very useful features. Listening, reading and writing tests are all facilitated by interactive whiteboards and they can be used to build vocabulary and teach pupils the basic building blocks of English in prefixes, suffixes, base words and root words.

Organisation and pre-class planning are key facets of any school curriculum and a teacher that fails to plan, in effect, plans to fail.