Teaching Young Learners

B) Speaking

5-8 year olds:

• Playing with sounds and words (Odd one out).
• Short rhymes.
• Talking about their families, their likes and dislikes, daily activities.
• songs, poems, rhymes and stories. (Mother Goose Jazz Chants, Singing, Chanting and Telling Tales and Jazz Chants Fairy Tales by Carolyn Graham)
• Cutting and colouring animals, things, scenes from stories and speaking at the same time.
• Info gap exercises such as: ‘What colour is the tail of your tiger?’ ‘Orange. What colour is the tail of your tiger?’ ‘Pink.’
• Rhyming Drama (Carolyn Graham’s Jazz Chants Fairy Tales can be staged)

9-11 year olds

• Quizzes (making their own); finding differences between two pictures (info gap);
• speaking board games - eg in each square you write something they have to talk about for 30 seconds or a minute (my room, my pet; my favourite food; my friend)
• drama, role-plays

11-13 year olds

• problem solving activities and games;
• board games with situations ("What would you do if you could understand the language of animals?"), when each of the players lands on a square with a situation they need to talk about it; the others will have to decide if they accept the answer or not. They can write the situations on the squares themselves.
• Project presentations
• Role-plays and drama; simulations

14-16 year olds

• drama, role-plays and simulations
• problem-solving activities
• information gap activities on different topics
• presentations of personal or group projects

17-19 year olds

• role-plays, simulations
• speeches and presentations
• problem-solving; negotiation games.

C) Reading

5-8 year olds

• words, short sentences; matching word with pictures.

9-11 year olds

• fables, very short stories, cartoons, poems, simplified texts from classical literary works or written for classroom use (Penguin Graded Readers at http://www.penguinreaders.com/)

11-13 year olds

• Same graded readers as above on topics of interest to them.
• Manuals to follow instructions on how to make things.
• Short stories; anecdotes with a moral at the end.
• Myths and legends; science fiction.

14-16 year olds

• Youth magazines, true stories in the news, short stories, interviews with film or music stars; guide books. It is important to know what their interests are so that you can choose really interesting texts. Students can bring their own texts into the classroom, but they will have to show them to you a day in advance so that you can prepare a lesson around it.
• Prediction tasks, jigsaw reading,

17-19 year olds

• Newspaper articles, classifieds, literature … everything that is of interest to them.
• Any activity that will allow them to get the most out of the texts and react to them in a personal way will work. So do not stop at factual questions, true/false statements, multiple choice exercises, scanning; start from here and move on to more personalized activities in the post-reading stage.

D) Writing

5-8 year olds (if you introduce writing at this age):

• probably simple games such as ‘hangman’ or exercises that require to fill in one letter of a word.
• Playing with letters: eg which words begin with a ‘b’? or Point at the letter ‘a’ or hold up the card with ‘c’
• copying words from lists to match pictures;

(You need to do lots of exercises of handwriting with the children whose mother tongue is written in a different alphabet.)

9-11 year olds

• Same as above if you introduce writing in English at this age.
• Short messages, postcards, cards for different occasions. (They will enjoy making the cards as well.)
• Short descriptions of favourite heroes
• Speech bubbles in cartoons

11-13 year olds

• Letters; e-mail messages;
• Projects

14-16 year olds

• Projects
• Letters formal/informal; book/film/TV programme reviews
• Group writing as technique

17-19 year olds

• Reflective essays
• Creative writing
• Functional writing (letters formal/informal; reports; reviews)
• Articles
• Speeches (text)
• Projects

E) Vocabulary

5-8 year olds:

• Use realia and pictures. Visuals are extremely important for this age for both presentation and practice. Teach the vocabulary connected with what is familiar to the students in their environment (family, animals, food, things in the house and in the classroom, daily activities, etc). They learn fast by using all their senses. TPR is again the best approach for practising vocabulary through movement.

9-11 year olds:

• Flash cards, word cards, pictures, matching exercises.
• Games, such as Word Snap and Pelmanism, and other memory games; scrabble in a simplified form; word searches; simple crosswords with pictures instead of definitions.
• Categorizing vocabulary items (eg furniture in the bedroom, living room, etc); labelling pictures.
• They can start a vocabulary notebook where they can use drawings or stickers instead of definitions.

11-13 year olds:

• Same as above but the topics change.
• Word definitions can be used with learners of this age group.
• Word battleships, crosswords, mind maps to organize vocabulary connected with different topics.
• They can be encouraged to have a vocabulary book where they will write the words they want to remember with their definitions and drawings; also mind maps can be drawn in this notebook.

14-16 year olds

• Besides games such as crosswords, word searches, battleships, scrabble, word dominos for phrasal verbs or compound nouns, etc, etc, inferring meaning from texts is a useful activity. (eg intensive reading tasks such as ‘Read the text again and find the word that means the same as ‘fantastic’.)
• Encourage the use of a monolingual dictionary and do activities based on the use of these dictionaries.

17-19 year olds

• At this age students already have their own system of learning vocabulary. They have become more or less independent. They will always tell you what they need in terms of vocabulary or check the use of newly acquired words with you. They will challenge you in this respect.
• Thesaurus dictionaries; synonyms and antonyms, idioms; register and style.
• Word games such as more complicated crosswords are enjoyable and fun.

F) Grammar

5-8 year olds

• Young children pick up language in chunks and are unable to analyze language from a grammatical perspective. For example children will be able to understand the idea of the past tense once they have had stories told/read to them that use narrative past tenses. Grammar will be picked up rather than learnt. Focus should be on ensuring that meaning is always paramount. Also, grammatical structures have to be presented in a context (story, poem, song, using the situation in the classroom or students’ experience) and practised through speaking by trial and error. Error correction should be very subtle, continuous and consistent. (eg "Miss T, yesterday I speaked English at home." "Oh, you spoke English at home. That’s so nice. Who did you speak English to?" "I speaked with my mum." "Great, you spoke with your mum. What about your brother?" "Yes, I spoke to him, too."
• Grammar chants will help internalisation of structures and their pronunciation (eg Carolyn Graham’s Jazz chants for Children and Grammar Chants)

9-11 year olds

• Basically the routines are the same as above, but this time you can switch gradually to some language observation during the presentation stage. eg if you write on the board sentences with verbs in the past tense taken from a story you have just told them, you can encourage them to notice the pattern. ("What do some of the words naming actions have in common?")

11-13 year olds

• At this age they start to enjoy noticing language. Also some grammatical metalanguage can be used with them, such as ‘nouns’, ‘verbs’, ‘adjectives’, etc, but only if you think this will help or if it is imposed by the decision-making bodies in education. This issue is very culturally sensitive.

14-16 year olds

• Most of these young learners start learning for examinations (national and international examinations, such as Cambridge ESOL exams). Grammar being one of the papers for examinations, you will need to teach the students more formal grammar. The basic structures have already been learned, most grammatical metalanguage is familiar, so the more complicated grammatical issues can be taught inductively or deductively.
• Grammar games can be played.
• Role-plays and other production activities are used to practice the structures in meaningful contexts.

17-19 year olds

• This is definitely the age to teach for examinations. They can learn independently, they have the grammatical metalanguage that will help them use grammar reference books on their own. It should not be a problem for the students to pass these examinations if they test their communicative competence, such as Cambridge ESOL examinations. All they need to be taught is how to deal with time constraints and to be familiar with the test items. Practice using examination-type tasks helps a lot.

Now go back to the grid on page 5 and compare what you have already written with what you have learned so far. Complete the grid if you need to. There are some suggested answers in the Self-check key at the end of this unit.