Learning & Development

Vocabulary is important. With more vocabulary, there will be more comprehension, and there will be more acquisition. In giving input, in talking to students, the teacher needs to be concerned primarily with whether the students understand the message.

Teachers of Young Learners:

• Instruction (To provide developmentally appropriate instruction)
• Aware (Be aware of children’s basic physical and psychological needs)
• Jobs (To provide care and to provide interesting content.)
• Educational Experiences (Meet the developmental stages of the individual child)
• Challenge (Give them some challenge to know about their knowledge of language learning).

Principles to Teach Young Learners:

1. Build teaching around physical activity and movement
2. Build lessons around themes
3. Give some interesting activities to do
4. Choose content that kids know

Ssource: Teaching Young Language Learners (Second Edition). Annamaria Pinter. Oxford University Press 2017

Teaching listening and speaking

Listening

Because children typically cannot read or write, the two most important abilities to teach first are listening and speaking. Young learners should begin with a lot of listening practice, and opportunities to listen to a lot of different kinds of information will naturally lead to a speaking assignment.

Listening means paying attention to the words that are being spoken with the intention of understanding. Learners have to be able to understand the main idea of what is said.

Total Physical Response (TPR) activity

While demonstrating, the teacher offers an oral order. Simple orders can be followed by children or young learners.

Teachers should consider the following when using TPR activity:

• The complexity of the language being used (vocabulary and word diction)
• Making sure the grammar is clear and easily to be understood by young learners

Speaking

Speaking is one way for them to play, in this case is playing with sounds and words.

What young learners can do in speaking?

•  They can talk about what they are doing 
•  They can tell you about what have they done or heard 
•  They can argue for something and tell you why they think what they think

Classroom techniques and activities: using puppets, role play, talking and writing box, fishbowl technique, teaching pronunciation, tongue twister.

Learning to Learn

Encourage Good Behaviour to Children. Children quickly learn how to behave when they get positive, consistent guidance from you.

1. Be a role model
Use your own behaviour to guide your child.

2. Show the children how you feel
Telling your child honestly how their behaviour affects you helps your child see their own feelings in yours.  

3. Catch your child being ‘good’
When your child is behaving in a way you like, give your child some positive feedback. Example: ‘Wow, you’re playing so nicely. I really like the way you’re keeping all the blocks on the table’. This works better than waiting for the blocks to come crashing to the floor before you take notice and say, ‘Hey, stop that’.

4. Keep things simple and positive
Instruction should be clear, short and appropriate for your child’s age, so your child can understand and remember them.

Babies And Young Children Learn. The parents, other family members and carers – for example, early childhood educators – are the foundation for children’s health learning and development.

Children Learns by Being Involved in His Learning.

• Choosing books to read
• Pointing to pictures in books
• Choosing objects and toys to play with
• Picking out vegetables for dinner
• Measuring out flour for muffins.

What Young Children Are Learning?

1. Self and relationships
   Children learn that she’s loved and important. She starts learning to understand her own needs, thoughts, feelings, likes and dislikes.
2. Language and communication
   When you talk and listen with children, and read and sing together, you’re helping him learn about language, written and spoken communication, and conversation skills like taking turns and listening.
3. Numeracy, literacy, handwriting and music

Children develops early literacy through reading and storytelling, playing simple sound and letter games like listening for words that begin with the same sound, and looking at pictures, letters and words in the environment and in catalogues.

Hand writing Skills develop when you encourage him to draw, scribble and write.

Writing, helps your child understand the connection between letters and spoken sounds.

Singing, listening to music, and giving her musical instruments to play.

Source: https://raisingchildren.net.au/preschoolers/play-learning/literacy-reading-stories/reading-storytelling

Teaching Reading and Writing

Teaching reading is the process of giving lessons and giving instructions to students so that students can understand the message from the author through written language or medium of words.

The importance of teaching reading: young learners should be taught to read many types of books from an early age. Reading leads to good writing. Reading can build confidence and language proficiency.

Approach to teaching reading: phonic approach, whole word approach, language experience approach

Activities for young learners: decoding games, word search bingo, word families.

Teaching writing is providing information and instructions systematically about how to express ideas and feelings through writing instruments.

The importance of teaching writing: Can train the ability of young learners in thinking, Imagination is well developed, young learners can know and understand more vocabulary.

Approach to teaching writing: pragmatic approach, rhetorical approach, critical approach, expressive approach.

Activities for young learners: story chains, picture description, cards and letters.

Learning a Second/Third Language at Home and at School

Language acquisition is closely related to how children acquire words, meanings, structures, and pragmatics. It is nothing but related to the processes that occur in the minds and attitudes of children.

Billingualism is having or using two languages especially as spoken with the fluency characteristic of a native speaker.

There are two benefits of being Bilingual: Metalinguistic awareness (manipulating and labeling language), Executive control functions (helping children to switch between conflicting rules by suppressing one.)

THE EFFECT AGE:

The critical Period Hypothesis (CPH)

In language acquisition, it is recommended that children who start learning a second language when they are less than 11-12 years old have a lot of input and involvement in the environment.

Younger Learners v.s Older Learners

Children are sensitive to the sounds and the rhythm of new languages. They enjoy copying new sounds and patterns of intonation. Younger learners are less anxious and less inhibited and they can spend more time devoted to the language compared with those who start later.

Older learners use more efficient strategies, have more mature conceptual world to rely on, have a clearer sense of discourse and have a clearer sense of why they are learning a new language. Older learners are more analytical and give attention to detail.

Learning a second language at Home

The role of parents in mastering a second language is: parenting, facilitate, communicate, collaborate, interests, habits and performances. Parents have a critical part in their child's language learning growth and success. Maintain a positive attitude toward learning and discuss the importance of learning a second language with your child. Your child will be a successful bilingual with your help and encouragement.

Learning a second language at school

School is part of a formal environment, which is organized formally and carefully, and where the school prepares for the learning process in the classroom, which is led by the teacher. Students are directed to the teacher in a formal atmosphere in such a way as to understand the system or laws and regulations of the language being studied.

Sternberg (1979: 166) mentions the characteristics of the language learning environment in the classroom as follows:

• The language learning environment in the classroom is strongly colored by the class social psychologist factors which include adjustments, disciplines, and procedures used.
• In the classroom environment, pre-selection of linguistic data is carried out.
• In the classroom environment, grammatical rules are presented explicitly to improve the quality of students' language
• In the classroom environment, teaching tools are provided such as textbooks, supporting books, blackboards, tasks to be completed, and so on.

Teaching Young Language Learners (Second Edition). Annamaria Pinter. Oxford University Press 2017

Policy: Primary ELT Programmes

There are policies on EYL program activities such as: Listening (Listen and Imitate, Listen and Repeat, Listen and follow instruction, Listen and Match), Speaking, Reading, Writing.

There are several types of contextual factors: Language teaching or settings, educational frameworks, Status English and attitude to English.

Motivation is decisive in learning language especially if it is not your mother tongue. Motivation also can be defined as a key in learning other languages. The first language is a natural part of growing up, whereas the second foreign language is a result of motivation and hard work.

According to Dornyei, there are four main stages or components of motivational teaching:
•   Create motivating conditions for learning. This means creating a pleasant and supportive environment in the classroom. 
•       Introduce initial motivational techniques such as talking about values, showing positive attitudes to learning, creating materials that are relevant for the learners, and establishing expectations of success.
•       Teachers need to take care to maintain and protect their learners’ motivation by offering stimulating activities and fostering self-esteem, self-confidence, and cooperation among learners. 
Motivating teachers take care to turn evaluation and feedback into positive experiences.

Source: Teaching Young Language Learners (Second Edition). Annamaria Pinter. Oxford University Press 2017

Learning The First Language at Home and at School

The first language is also referred to as the mother tongue. Mother tongue is the first language mastered by humans from birth through interaction with fellow members of the language community, such as family and the environmental community.

The acquisition of a first language leads to the way children learns their mother tongue. For example, with Babbling, babbling is considered an early form of language acquisition because babies will produce sounds based on the language input they receive.

The acquisition of the first language is very influential on the cognitive and social development of children. Children begin to recognize verbal communication with their environment.

Adults help children learn languages mainly by talking to them. usually occurs when a mother coaxes and talks with her baby with her child, and occurs when a teacher patiently repeats instructions to an inattentive student.

'Baby talk' has simpler vocabulary and sentence structure than adult language, exaggerated intonation and sounds, and lots of repetition and questions.

the first language is obtained through:

The role of input and interaction

by the time children are four or five years old usually learn to use their mother tongue to communicate in their environment.

Research in the 1970s, such as the study by Catherine Snow in 1972 (in Fletcher & Garman, 1986), showed that mothers' speech to their babies was slower and more repetitive than their normal speech to adults. They used various simplifications and modifications in their speech and these were shown to be very helpful in making the input comprehensible to children.

The role of Universal Grammar

The famous linguist Noam Chomsky argued that children often produced language that they could not have heard in natural interactions with others.

All children who learn English as their mother tongue produce past tense words such as looked and tired. They attach regular past tense clues to irregular verbs.

The influence of school on first language development

Language use at home

At home most of the communication is embedded in a shared direct context, the use of school language is more independent of the direct context.

Parents/Caregivers naturally scaffold their children's language in dialogue.

It is often difficult for children to make the leap from using home language to school, from implicit to more explicit ways of using their first language.

Language use at school

With more complex grammar, children will learn to deal with types of clauses, complex sentences, and rules for connecting ideas in speaking and writing. They will also acquire formal, literary, historical, and ancient phrases and relate variations of their mother tongue, as well as other regional accents.

Children will continue to learn about their first language in school, and they may find a standard version of their first language that may be very different from the dialect spoken at home.

Sources:

Teaching Young Language Learners (Second Edition). Annamaria Pinter. Oxford University Press 2017

Children First Language Acquisition At Age 1-3 Years Old In Balata. Bertaria Sohnata Hutauruk. IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science

How Young Children Learn Language. Dr. Bruce D. Perry.  https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/how-young-children-learn-language/

Language Use At Home And School: A Synthesis Of Research For Pacific Educators. Zoe Ann Brown, Ormond W. Hammond, and Denise L. Onikama. Pacific Resources for Education and Learning. 1997
Linguistic Society of America. https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/faq-how-do-we-learn-language

https://kbbi.web.id/bahasa