Teaching Young Learners


Louisa Walsh of Global English offers some guidance

It is true. Some people just have a real knack for teaching young learners. Possibly they already have children of their own or else they are blessed with an affinity for youngsters and endless patience! Regardless of your own attitude to teaching this age group (I'm speaking about 4-14 year olds here, rather than teenagers or kindergarten age learners) you will probably find yourself in front of a young class at some stage in your career. Difficult and challenging they may be but get it right and they can be the most enthusiastic and rewarding of students. Here Louisa Walsh gives provides some pointers.

Keep it fun, lively and simple. You could take a project based approach so one theme is exploited in lots of different ways over a series of lessons. (See an example below or a project based set of lessons.)In this way the vocabulary is reinforced and repeated in a variety of different tasks so they do not get bored.

Variety is the key and with the very young, lots of short, simple, activities are best suited to their attention span. Keep your learning aims very simple and build in plenty of child-friendly practice tasks to allow them to practice your target language again and again.

For the practice tasks, think of the things children like doing anyway and incorporate theses activities into lessons. These could be singing, colouring, or working in small groups to produce a poster, for example. Use children's love of rhyming and chanting to teach such things as numbers and the alphabet. The great thing about really young ones (say 4-12 years old) is that they are generally less inhibited about using another language and so you can get them to speak quite early on.

Think 'how can I make this exercise more appealing?' This could mean adapting existing exercises to become more child-friendly. For example, a common way to test reading comprehension is through responding to true or false questions. Instead of having them write or tell you the answer, consider making one end of the room the 'true' side and the other the 'false' side so children can move to the appropriate side when asked. Alternatively, students can make their own 'true' and 'false' cards to hold up in response. Children learn when they are engaged and many respond well to physical and visual stimuli. The possibilities for adapting tasks so they become more engaging for youngsters are endless. Use your creativity!

While it might be tempting to bring in an English teen magazines for your group of 13 year old Spanish girls, don't. Most material meant for English children will be unsuitable for their foreign peers. This includes all but the basic rhymes and songs, most cartoon strips and other reading material. Instead, choose course books and resources specially designed for young foreign learners of English which will have material 'graded' for level and age. These resource books are fun, colourful and child-friendly. Even so, I would 'dip' into theses books rather than follow them slavishly. While very young children may not be reading or writing much, I would always try to make sure, where appropriate that they have some access to the written version of any vocabulary introduced. It is handy to build up a reference for later use and helps them to become gradually familiar with these words in written form.

Always build in plenty of revision tasks. These can be game or quiz based in nature to keep the fun element going throughout.

A project example: Here is just one example of a project based lesson spread across a few lessons. Students will need to know numbers 1-5, 'big', 'small', 'he/she/it has' and some basic colours for the following:

Project: Monsters.

Objective: To learn body parts and to understand instructions relating to body parts, number and colour.

1. Think about the basic body parts to be introduced, maybe 8 items altogether (the face items, legs, arms, shoulders.)

2. Touch each part of your body and get the all children to repeat the name. Do this several times.

3. Touch each body part but do not say the word, get all children to say the appropriate word as you touch the corresponding part.

4. Test retention by saying 'touch your head.touch your toes' etc. to the class. All class members touch the appropriate part.

5. Repeat the above with individual children rather than as a class

6. Children in pairs - 1 says 'eyes', 'ears' and their partner touches, then change around.

7. Hand out a picture of a monster with colour coded instructions written underneath e.g. He has blue eyes. Read them aloud. We would not necessarily expect students to read but they this helps them to become familiar with the written forms. Students colour in the monster according to the written and verbal instruction.

8. Teacher has a picture of a monster previously drawn. Now, do a picture dictation. E.g. my monster has got a big head and 3 eyes etc. pausing so children can draw as you speak. Children compare their monster with yours to see if it looks the same.

9. Written work: Children match the picture of the body part to the written word.

10. Get children to draw their own monster. They take it in turns to dictate it to their partner.

11. Sing head, shoulders knees and toes.

This is just a rough outline of a small project based lesson/lessons. There are other activities which could include putting students in small groups to make their own composite monster/funny person by assembling an array of previously cut out heads, arms etc. and sticking them on a paper for a wall display. They could carefully copy the words 'arms' and 'legs' etc to label their work of art for a wall display.

Alternatively, students could make a play-doh monster in small groups, name it and introduce it to the rest of the class. Prompt by asking questions about their creation. After taking such time and trouble to create and name their own monster, they should be bursting to tell you about it - and hopefully using all the wonderful language you have so patiently helped them to master.

Further resources and ideas: http://www.longman.com/young_learners/teachers/

http://www.longman.com/young_learners/pdfs/PYRMay.pdf Look at the monster/bodypart handout here. This can be incorporated into a bigger lesson (or lessons) on body parts

Also, http://members.tripod.com/~ESL4Kids/

Global English students - Look out for a young learner's competition in late November when we will be giving away a set of young learner course books and class cassettes to a lucky winner.

Like most TEFL courses, Global English courses are geared towards young adults and upwards. However our courses do contain some very useful information on young learners and the methodology introduced on the course can be easily adapted to suit all ages. For more information on our courses, click here

If you would like to contact Louisa about this article or any area of TEFL, please email her on lwalsh@global-english.com