Summary of the article entitled” Teaching English to Young Learners: Some Points to be Considered”

Link to the article:

https://ajouronline.com/index.php/AJEEL/article/view/575

This article deals with important notions related to teaching English to young learners. It helps understand the characteristics of young learners, the principles of good learning materials, and the techniques which facilitate teaching English to young learners. The article starts by giving the characteristics of young learners since it is important to know well the receiver in order to succeed in conveying the message. These characteristics and the materials recommended can be summarized in the following points:

A.      Young learners learn concrete notions rather than abstract ones. Thus, it is important for teachers to avoid teaching abstract notions till the students reach the appropriate stage that allows them. Teachers must start by familiar topics such as colours, animals, fruits, body parts … and they ca bring concrete items.

B.      Young learners learn better from their experiences and are active learners and thinkers. Hence, it is through doing things that they learn. So, teachers must provide them with the suitable environment to experience the needed notions. Appropriate activities can be cooking, planting. These activities give them the opportunity to learn while experiencing.

C.      Young learners have a quite short attention span. This information has to be reflected in the classroom in varying between individual, pair and group works and also types of question. Varying between playing games, watching films, listening to music, is a good solution to this.

D.     Children learn better when activities that are given to them are meaningful. Consequently, teachers must provide them with appropriate meaningful activities. Materials that can be used are real stories and story lines.

E.     “Youn learners learn by thinking in term of theme”. This means that at a time, children can deal with one thing. So, to avoid frustration, teachers must avoid teaching lots of things at the same time.

F.       “Youn learners learn best as a community of learners in non-competitive environment” This means that competition between children causes stress. Teachers must encourage collaboration rather than competition and select activities and games of a collective nature.

The article provides also some techniques to facilitate young learners learning. Among them we state:

a)      Use English more frequent to provide exposure to the language. The teacher should use the target language from the very beginning because students need to be exposed to it in order to get familiar with.

b)      Use activity-based teaching-learning techniques. Teachers can use games, young learners can listen to their teacher telling them what to do and they do it.

c)      Use various techniques for short periods of time. It is important for teachers to vary the types of learning activities since young learners lose interest more quickly

d)      Focus on functional English for vocabulary development, and for immediate fulfilment of communicative needs of the learners. Teachers should teach vocabularies in contextual meaning

e)      Reiterate often to ensure the acquisition of English. In order to make the students acquire the language in optimum way, the teacher should repeat the pronunciation of the words often.

f)       Provide useful, acquisition-promoting routines .Young learners need to repeat language items many times to get them to stick.

g)      Provide print-rich environment in English. Teachers can put some prints such as the rules in the classroom, list of vocabularies, or pictures such as the picture of part of body, picture of animals

Although this article covers important number of issues related to teaching English to young learners, certain information could be added to it. For example, the characteristics of the language teacher. Among these characteristics we mention that the teacher:

1.      Must be energetic and patient.

2.      Must love children.

3.      Must pay attention to individual differences.

4.      Must encourage students.

5.      Must let children see the beautiful and useful aspects of the language.

6.      Must let them love you as the language teacher and the new language as well.

7.      Must know the techniques of teaching.

8.      Must respect children as human.

9.      Must start teaching to children as soon as possible.