by Daniel Tse
For many newly qualified teachers, the mention of teaching Young Learners (YLs) is certain to provoke mixed feelings. While some teachers embrace the challenges of managing YL classes, others consider it a nerve-racking experience. Regardless of their reaction, teachers who have worked exclusively with adult learners often find themselves being thrown in at the deep end as they transition to teaching YLs.
With only five and a half years’ experience of teaching YLs aged eight or above, I dare not claim to be a specialist in this area. I hope, however, that I can facilitate the transition for anyone entering the young learner classroom with my comments on four different aspects of teaching YLs.
Reverse order of written and spoken practice
In pre-service training courses, teachers are instructed to provide adult learners with written controlled practice prior to any spoken practice in grammar or vocabulary lessons. By first doing written practice, learners can reinforce the form of the target grammatical structure or lexical item. They should also feel more confident in any subsequent spoken practice.
If one observes how children acquire their first language, however, it can be seen that writing skills are usually developed several years after a child has begun to produce comprehensible speech. To reflect this order of skills development, therefore, spoken practice can precede written practice in YL lessons.
A language practice routine for YLs that I usually follow spans two consecutive lessons. For instance, if the target language is the past simple with regular verbs, learners can tell each other what they did at the weekend in the first controlled spoken practice. This should also include the negative form, i.e., what learners didn’t do last weekend. After that, learners do a written sentence construction task in the same context; I always keep sample sentences on the board so that my students can copy these as task models.
In the subsequent freer spoken practice, teachers can introduce a wider range of time expressions, or other subject pronouns. To lend a different feeling to this activity, teachers can play music in the background. Learners then walk around the classroom until the music stops. When this happens, they have to find another classmate and compare their spoken sentences in the past simple. I first learnt this idea from observing my former YL Director of Studies five years ago.
Beyond the lesson, learners continue their language practice by doing written homework as a consolidation exercise. When learners return to the classroom, the next lesson begins with a spoken revision activity. I usually use substitution drills with small classes to make it as interactive and meaningful as possible. In this activity, the whole class stands in a circle and the teacher models a sentence with the target language from the previous lesson, e.g. I walked to school this morning. What about you? Learners follow suit one after another and round the circle. With big primary school classes, this activity is more effectively done in multiple groups to avoid extended waiting among the learners and thus their loss of concentration.
Flow chart representation of the stages of grammar practice in YL lessons
Clarifying grammar without metalanguage
In pre-service courses, the standard technique of using metalanguage, or the language for describing and analysing languages, to clarify grammatical structures for adult learners needs no introduction. But terms such as subject, auxiliary verb, and modal verb will hardly be understood by YLs as these lie beyond their real-world knowledge. In other words, metalanguage is too abstract a concept for most children to grasp. If teachers of YLs rely on metalanguage in their clarification of grammar, the learners’ lack of comprehension will become apparent when they are unable to produce language other than a given model. This usually occurs in the initial practice activity.
In clarifying grammar for YLs, I have experimented with colours, shapes, notional grammar, and real-world situations. While colours and shapes illustrate the grammatical form, notions and situations are useful for YLs’ understanding of meaning. In my experience, notions have been a particularly effective tool when they match the learners’ schemata, or existing knowledge. Using the past simple negative as an example, the metalinguistic terms auxiliary verb and lexical/main verb are graded down to signal of the past and action/activity. To clarify the meaning of this morning, real dates that correspond to that of the lesson are used.
If technology permits, colour codes can be integrated into the formal structure, such as I (red) didn’t go (orange) to school (yellow) this morning (green). The order of colours is not arbitrarily chosen; it comes from the rainbow colours song, which many YLs will already be familiar with.
One useful outcome here is that the rainbow sequence is broken when the students make questions that involve inversion - which means that the teacher can tell the students to “bend the rainbow” if they forget that the word order is different.
Clarification of the past simple with colours and notions
Responsive classroom rules
Adult learners seldom require rules to enforce sensible behaviour in the classroom. You only have to walk past a room being used for YLs to know that younger people do not behave the same way! It is said that children’s cognitive development, as determined by the amount of grey matter in their frontal lobe, continues until 11 to 12 years old (Giedd et al. 1999). This means that many YLs may not fully understand whether their behaviour is considered ‘acceptable’ in the classroom. Consequently, teachers of YLs need to establish classroom rules in the first lesson to guide learners’ behaviour, and to refer back to what they’ve established as often as necessary to avoid behaviour issues from escalating.
Although rules should not be changed frequently at the whim of the teacher, they are not set in stone either. It is undoubtedly a sensible idea for teachers and learners to agree on some common rules, in order to aid classroom management and foster an environment conducive to learning. Here is one of my favourite rules: when one person is speaking to the class, we stop talking and listen. This applies to the teacher as well as any student in all of my YL classes.
Teachers can subsequently observe their students’ behaviour and decide whether it would be necessary to add any new rules. When I was teaching an A1 group of ten-year-olds, including the son of one of the school managers’, several students would frequently ask me for permission to use the washroom or water fountain. They did so, moreover, at the critical moments of a lesson. Not only did it cause constant disruption, it also negatively impacted their learning as they were often unable to take full advantage of practice opportunities in the classroom.
So, I added a new rule in the third lesson to prevent foreseeable interruptions: students are allowed to go to the washroom or use the water fountain only once in each lesson (‘washroom x 1 and water x 1’). While this rule may sound draconian out of context, it was introduced with good reason. Nonetheless, an exception would be made for any student in urgent need of relieving themselves or those with medical requirements. As a targeted response to my students’ behaviour, my new rule effectively reduced the number of times that they left the classroom mid-lesson, and I felt it was worth putting my foot down this one time.
Classroom language
Younger Learners tend to use their L1 for classroom interactions, such as asking for permission or when borrowing stationery. This is language that should be taught in an early lesson, and revised as often as necessary, since this language will emerge frequently and represents the perfect target for YLs.
Considering the lack of language knowledge among most YLs, teachers can elicit individual words in English before they provide the full expression. For example, most learners should know the frequently used word toilet for the classic question Can I go to the toilet? Subsequently, learners practise the classroom language in repetition drills.
Depending on my students’ age and motor skills, I choose from a range of practice activities, including jumbled sentences, whispers (or the telephone game), and flashcards. Learners can work in groups and create mini-posters of classroom language; they decorate their classroom afterwards by sticking the completed cards on the walls or noticeboards. Similarly, learners can form teams and compete against each other in the whispers game as spoken repetition practice.
Beyond the first lesson, teachers may need to actively prompt their students to use classroom language in English when they switch back to their first language. A simple command, e.g. ask me/your classmate in English, is an appropriate response; other teachers like to smile and say It’s English time as a way of reminding their students of the goal of the lessons. Teachers may also give their students points for using English as a kind of positive classroom behaviour. It’s important, though, not to denigrate the learners’ L1, as this can lead to confusion in the short term and a negative attitude towards English in the long term.
Conclusion
While the above ideas are informed by my firsthand experience of working with YLs as well as my formal learning, some of them may work more effectively than others in your own classroom contexts. All in all, a successful transition to teaching YLs involves trial and error as well as learning on the job. The EFL industry as a whole is continuing its march towards the younger end of the spectrum - so if you aren’t a YL teacher today, you might be one tomorrow, and my hope is that articles such as this one will help smooth the way.
Bibliography
Giedd, J., Blumenthal, J., and Jeffries, N. et al. ‘Brain development during childhood and adolescence: a longitudinal MRI study’ in Nature Neuroscience, Vol. 2/10. New York: Nature America (1999). 861-863.
I Can Sing a Rainbow. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBaC8Az-P3o> Little Clementine TV. Accessed on 22 December 2024.
Author Biography
Daniel Tse works as a teacher and examiner in Italy. He has taught EFL at IH Milan and San Donato since 2019. He works with Young Learners, teens, and adults across the full range of CEFR levels. He mainly teaches Cambridge/IELTS Exam Preparation and Business English, as well as an increasing number of CLIL and ‘top-up’ courses in Italian schools and universities. An early-career teacher, he is currently on the final leg of his journey through the DELTA.
In addition to teaching, Daniel runs teacher development workshops and speaks at ELT conferences for Macmillan Education Italy. He has also spoken individually at local and international conferences in several European countries, the IATEFL Conference in the UK, and British Council TeachingEnglish webinars. He has recently taken up a new independent role in training and observing school teachers in Italy on CLIL.