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WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

YOUNG LEARNERS

In this book, ‘young learners’ means children from the first year of formal schooling (five or six years old) to eleven or twelve years of age. However, as any children’s teacher will know, it is not so much the children’s age that counts in the classroom as how mature they are. There are many factors that influence children’s maturity: for example, their culture, their environment (city or rural), their sex, the expectations of their peers and parents. The approach and type of activity that you decide to use with a class will be influenced by your knowledge of their circumstances, attitudes, and interests rather than simply by the children’s physical age. So although a recommended age range is given for each activity, it should be taken as a guide, not a hard and fast rule.

THEIR TEACHERS

As English becomes more and more accepted as an international language, it is increasingly included in primary curricula, where it is often taught by non-native speakers. Although they are trained primary teachers, they may not be trained language teachers. There are also more and more private language schools that provide classes for young learners: their teachers are often native speakers who have not had specific training in teaching children.

One of the aims of this book is to provide information and activities that will meet the needs of these two very different groups of teachers. I hope that there will be at least something for everyone and that the second aim of this book, to provide teachers with ideas and techniques that they can use when designing supplementary activities for their own classes, will be achieved.

PRIMARY EDUCATION

The years at primary school are extremely important in children’s intellectual, physical, emotional, and social development. They go through a series of stages, progressively acquiring skills that are thought necessary by the society they live in. Many of these skills are independent, and if one has not been sufficiently developed, the acquisition of another may be impeded. For example, children who are unable to identify the odd shape in the following group will have difficulty in differentiating between the letters p, b, and d.

Similarly, if an older child is unable to dissociate him- or herself from the here and now, and to project and enter into imaginary or hypothetical worlds, he or she will find it difficult to make deductions from evidence, to apply his or her own experience to other situations, or indeed to accept that the world has not always been as it is now. This is a serious handicap in educational systems in which knowledge is usually acquired from books and not from firsthand experience.

On the physical side, children need to develop balance, spatial awareness, and fine control of certain muscles in order to play sports and perform everyday actions such as dressing themselves, cleaning their teeth, colouring, drawing, and writing.

Socially, children need to develop a series of characteristics to enable them to fit into the society they live in, to become aware of themselves in relation to others, to share and co-operate, and to be assertive without being aggressive. These social skills vary from culture to culture and generation to generation and often form part of the ‘hidden curriculum’, although they are increasingly being defined by Ministries of Education.

Finally, it is increasingly recognized that children need to ‘learn how to learn’. This means that their education and learning should not be confined to the limits of their classroom, textbooks, and teacher, but that we should help them to acquire skills and independence that will enable them to continue learning outside and beyond school. This implies that they need to be able to accept criticism and become self-critical, to be aware of how they learn, and to experiment with different learning styles, to organize their work, and to be open and interested in all that surrounds them.

All this means that primary language teachers have a much wider responsibility than the mere teaching of a language system: they need to bear in mind the education of the whole child when planning their teaching programme.

TEACHING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE TO YOUNG LEARNERS

The way children learn a foreign language, and therefore the way to teach it, obviously depends on their developmental stage. It would not be reasonable to ask a child to do a task that demands a sophisticated control of spatial orientation (for example, tracing a route on a map) if he or she has not yet developed this skill. On the other hand, beginners of 11 or 12 years of age will not respond well to an activity that they perceive as childish, or well below their intellectual level, even if it is linguistically appropriate (for example, identifying an odd shape out of matching picture halves).