Theme: Responding to different learning styles when teaching foreign languages to young learners content introduction chapter general issues of communicative teaching foreign language communication of younger students

CHAPTER 2. PSYCHOLOGICAL STYLES OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN OF PRIMARY SCHOOL AGE
A foreign language at an early stage of learning contributes to the overall intellectual development of children, forms communication skills. If the child has mastered the "basic units" of the language being studied at an early age, then in the subsequent period the learning process will be more successful.
Learning objectives should be based on personal factors. In learning a foreign language, all channels of the child's perception - eyes, ears, mouth, nose, arms, legs, the whole body - should be used to comprehend the meaning of the material being studied. Language for children is a means, a communicative tool, but never a goal.
Children of primary school age are inquisitive. When perceiving, they tend to pay attention to the bright, emotionally colored. However, their attention is characterized by instability: they are able to concentrate only for a few minutes. Children do not perceive long (more than 2-5 minutes) monologue explanations of the teacher, so any explanation must be built in the form of a conversation. Mnemic activity of children is still imperfect. Involuntary memorization prevails in them: what is interesting and causes an emotional response is well and quickly remembered. The use of game techniques makes it possible to create conditions for the arbitrary assimilation by children of all language means (vocabulary and speech patterns) in the process of fascinating interaction of children with each other.
The imagination of the children is quite developed and is not only reproducing, but also creative. The development of thinking goes from visual-effective to visual-figurative. The very thought of a junior schoolchild does not yet fully obey the logical plan of its presentation. Statements are often not logical enough. When perceiving the text by ear, the younger student is focused mainly on understanding what the text is about, and not on what is disclosed in the text and for what purpose, by what means this is achieved. The image created by the text often evokes emotions, experiences and thus distracts the child from the content. However, in the case when a child is purposefully taught spelling, punctuation, construction of texts, communication, he reveals a higher level of development in all types of speech activity.
As for the speech development of children, they are able to conduct the simplest sound analysis of speech, they are able to isolate individual sounds in words. The speech is mainly descriptive, but the development of explanatory speech is already outlined. For example, children can explain the rules of the game.
Along with oral forms of communication, writing and reading are purposefully formed at primary school age. Although the texts of younger students are characterized by incompleteness, incompleteness and incomplete expression of thought, there is often no logical connection between sentences. Nevertheless, in the conditions of solving creative problems, a younger student can produce a real written text. This causes significant shifts in the development of his oral speech. This fact is taken into account when teaching children a foreign language - the organization of interconnected training in all types of speech activity.
Young children are very sociable and love to be in a peer group. But it must be remembered that “children do not personally take the remarks and instructions of the teacher to themselves, if these instructions are of a general nature, they apply to all students. It is also important for the teacher to know that very significant individual differences in psychological development are observed among children, to which special attention should be paid.
Children have different temperaments: some are aggressive, others are shy, others are too anxious, painfully experience their failures and are afraid to make a mistake. Accounting for all these differences will help the teacher to match each child with a more appropriate task or role. The extreme sensitivity of junior schoolchildren to the environment, the heightened perception of their achievements and failures, the presence of a dynamic relationship between emotional mood and school performance suggest that affective development should be the subject of close attention when teaching elementary school students.
It is necessary to take into account the features of the physical development of children 7-10 years old. The development of the muscles affects the ability of the child to concentrate on the page, line or word, which is necessary for the ability to read. It also affects the ability to hold a pencil or pen.
Young children cannot sit still for a long time due to lack of control over the motor muscles. Therefore, it is advisable to give them such tasks during the lesson that would allow children to move around the class (games, songs with movements, dances).
Summarizing the above, we can identify the following basic needs of students in grades 3-4:
- the need for movement;
- the need for communication;
- the need to feel safe;
- the need for praise for every small successful step;
- the need to feel like a person, and to be treated as a person by the teacher.
All this should be taken into account by foreign language teachers in the lower grades. In this case, the educational, developing, general educational function of a foreign language as an academic subject will be realized, especially in the most favorable language learning of all periods - preschool and primary school age.