The use of visual materials with young learners: A classroom observation approach

“Currently, the majority of parents want to provide their children with a second language to get a good job or to have a good level of English, nevertheless some schools do not have an English teacher, who can teach English as a second language to young learners. This study, carried out at a kindergarten in central Mexico, attempted first, to evaluate the use of visual materials with young learners and second to evaluate the children´s attitudes towards materials. In order to achieve these two aims, a classroom observation was used to collect the necessary data. The results of this research project suggested that using visual materials help children to improve their English vocabulary, the materials used in the present study were pictures, flash-cards, videos and real artefacts. Currently the majority of the writers have said that visual is the most fundamental of all senses, according to Fyle and Law (1988:2) “depiction, picturing and seeing are ubiquitous feature of the process by which most human beings come to know the world as it really is for them” (p. 3). It is known that the first sense that we develop is the visual one, which human beings have already developed since childhood. Berger (1979) suggests “that seeing comes before words “(p.4).