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Copyright ITTO International Teacher Training Organization
www.tefl-online.com | [email protected]
ITTOs Online TEYL Certification was designed specifically to meet the ever-increasing demand for qualified ESL teachers of young learners in non-English speaking countries around the world.
The objective of this 25 Hour Self-Guided Certificate Course is to help familiarize you with the various aspects of teaching English to children, whether pre-school, primary school age, or teens so that you can build a solid foundation and have confidence in teaching TEYL. Once you have completed the course, the material will be a valuable resource for you for years to come. Lets get started!
Chapter 1
Knowing Your Students
1.1 The challenge of teaching English to young learners
There must be dozens of reasons why teachers want to work with young learners. A common one is because teaching young learners is generally perceived as a fun and fulfilling activity. However, aside from the fact that this might be true, we must not underestimate the complexity of this challenging task. In order to teach them effectively, we need to understand how they learn. Moreover, we need to understand the role that cognitive, affective and psychological differences play in the learning process of this target group of students.
Research suggests that teachers of young learners should have the ability to understand their students cognitive and psychological needs. As William James (2001) puts it, having an understanding of child development could save teachers from selecting ineffective mistaken methods.
But how do children learn a language? Is there a relationship between the way students acquire their first language (L1) and the way they acquire a second (L2) language? Can children learn multiple languages at once? Is there an ideal age to learn languages? Do adults learn a second language the same way children learn their first or second language?
All of these captivating questions have been asked by thousands of linguists, psychologists and educators around the world. Unfortunately, even after many years of research, there are still no concrete answers; reasonably because language learning/acquisition has been analyzed and debated from different points of view: namely linguistically, cognitively, psychologically and pedagogically.
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Copyright ITTO International Teacher Training Organization
www.tefl-online.com | [email protected]
Thus, understanding how young learners learn is more complex than it seems. Naturally, a short course like this will not be enough to study and understand all of these varying views on language learning. However, in this chapter we will briefly summarize some of the most important findings on language learning and acquisition to have a broader view of the processes that take place in young learners when exposed to the target language.
Before we begin, it is necessary to define what we mean by young learners. Using Piaget's Development Theory as a basis where children displayed similar peculiarities between certain age groups, we have made the following distinction:
This distinction is essential due to the cognitive differences among the different groups.
Our main focus in this course will be on young learners.
