1.5 Peculiarities of teaching young learners

An Overview of Teaching English to Young Learners Teaching English to young learners (TEYL), including children within the 3-12 age range, in a meaningful and memorable way requires a person to understand how children learn and how they learn languages. In this lesson, we will look at some theories of how children learn and develop and how they might learn an additional, foreign or second language. In the next lesson, we will consider the implications these theories about learning have for teaching English to young learners. An approach to TEYL To begin, we will briefly consider important issues we need to be aware of so that we can get a clear overview of what is involved in TEYL. To illustrate this, I shall use a diagram (see Figure 1.1) to show how a number of building blocks (each representing a different part of language learning and teaching) can be placed together to create a structure that can represent our approach to TEYL. By stacking these blocks one on top of the other, we can consider how each is crucial for the support and development of the next in this tower of understanding.

Figure 1.1 Building blocks of understanding in teaching English to young learners

As you can see from Figure 1.1, the foundation block, which supports all the other blocks and is crucial to the strength of this tower of understanding, is How young learners develop and learn and learn languages. After looking at how learning takes place, we can examine more carefully what is involved in teaching with Implications for teaching English to young learners. Then, we can consider the various teaching techniques which can be implemented to help children develop different skills with How we can teach language to young learners (looking at areas such as teaching vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar as well as topic-based teaching), A focus on the four skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing) in TEYL, and Use of stories, songs, rhymes, games and role-plays in TEYL. Finally, on the top of the tower is Evaluation, assessment and research in TEYL, which allows us to look more closely at the outcomes of teaching and learning in our classrooms. Providing support Without the foundation block and, in fact, all these blocks in place, this tower would not be supported and would collapse. Similarly, our provision for teaching English to young learners would also collapse, and be unsuccessful somewhere along the way, if we missed any of these blocks of understanding in planning and carrying out our lessons for our young language learners.[18] During the 12 lessons of this course, we will examine more closely the blocks illustrated above. I hope you will come to understand more about each of them, and will also recognize that they are inseparable and dependent on each other and should always be kept in mind during your language teaching. Starting to learn another language The debate as to how young children learn another language continues, and is likely to continue, as the number of young children learning English increases and more research becomes available. The acquisition learning distinction is not new. It suggests that adults have two independent but interrelated systems for gaining ability in another language: acquisition and learning. The view of Crasher is that ‘The good language learner is an acquirer; he may or may not be a conscious learner’. Young children are acquirers. Acquisition takes place subconsciously in situations, speakers are more concerned with the use of language to convey meaning than with correct usage.[19] They want to say something, and without thinking to communicate with the language they know rather than analyses it in order to find out the correct ‘usage’ or way to use it. Teaching the rules of usage is not necessary for acquirers. Many young children are still acquiring Language 1. In their desire to communicate, they create situations in which language can be acquired. They are willing to use language and to experiment with sounds, without worrying about mistakes. They rarely have the inhibitions typical of adolescents and adults. When a young child learns another language, he approaches it in the same way as when he learns Language1: ‘his awareness of what he talks about normally takes precedence over his awareness of what he talks with – the words that he uses’. Thus for the maximum language acquisition in the classroom, young children need to be exposed to a program me rich in meaningful, real-life activities in which communication takes place naturally.

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