Young learners

2. CHILDREN AS LANGUAGE LEARNERS


Children can learn more than one language simultaneously and often do in their home and social contexts. Indeed, for many children in the world, being bilingual or multilingual is an everyday reality. However, learning a language in a school environment is a very different experience. For one thing, the hours of language exposure are much more limited. Instead of the child receiving hours of individualized comprehensible input from careers, which focuses on meaning through interaction, she will have a language class once or twice a week often in a large group of children nearly a quarter of the teachers in the study by reported class sizes of over 30 children. Moreover, it is probable that the child will take part in activities aimed at engaging the group rather than the individual. This is not the kind of engagement that is usually recognized as leading to the high levels of attainment and fluency that many consider are the outcomes of starting early³. The assumption that younger is better is controversial as previous studies have given contradictory results and there is no conclusive evidence for the supposed benefits of the early introduction of English into the curriculum. Nevertheless, primary English is now a reality in very many countries and recent discussions have turned to the role of ‘social, environmental and individual factors’ as well as the quality of teaching in English language primary education. Social factors can include such things as social class, which can affect children’s access to opportunities for learning, as well as the role of English in the learner’s society. Environmental factors include the learner’s home background and aspects such as parents’ attitude to the language. Individual factors include learners’ attitudes towards the language and their motivation to learn. Moreover, the importance of age-appropriate teaching has come to the fore. Teachers need a strong understanding of children’s social and cognitive development as well as a good understanding of theories of second language acquisition in order to teach effectively a child of three will be very different from a child of five or seven and classroom approaches that are suitable for the latter will not be so for the former. In their global study, came across a number of comments that suggested that in some cases, this kind of understanding was limited. For example teachers wrote that they were frustrated at teaching the finer points of grammar such as the present perfect tense to children who seemed unable to grasp them. As the children were under the age of 12, we may ask how appropriate such an activity is for this age group. On the other hand, in article, discusses the advantages of modelling interactions that pre-primary children can then imitate in English corners when playing independently. Shows how age appropriate activities can be effective in promoting opportunities for even very young children to learn in a classroom environment. While much of the research focuses on formal learning environments, we should not ignore the opportunities children have, even in what is traditionally called an EFL environment, to use English outside the classroom. Show how children in access English through popular culture, engaging with the language in order to listen, watch, or play.⁴ Also show how children engage with online games outside the classroom and identify the features that are attractive to children of different ages. What is exciting about these two studies is that they extend the traditional boundaries of research on YLs to engage with the realities of children learning English in the twenty first century. Learning language is natural and babies are born with the ability to learn it. All children, no matter which language their parents speak, learn a language in the same way. Basic Stages of Language Learning. There are three basic stages in which children develop their language skills.