Young learners

Stage One: Learning Sounds. When babies are born, they can make and hear all the sounds in all the languages in the world. That’s about 150 sounds in about 6500 languages, though no language uses all of those sounds. The sounds a language uses are called phonemes and English has about 44. Some languages use more and some use fewer. In this stage, babies learn which phonemes belong to the language they are learning and which don’t. The ability to recognize and produce those sounds is called phonemic awareness, which is important for children learning to read.

Stage Two: Learning Words. At this stage, children essentially learn how the sounds in a language go together to make meaning. For example, they learn that the sounds m-ah-m-ee refer to the being who cuddles and feeds them, their mommy. This is a significant step because everything we say is really just a stream of sounds. To make sense of those sounds, a child must be able to recognize where one word ends and another one begins. These are called word boundaries. However, children are not learning words, exactly. They are actually learning morphemes, which may or may not be words. A morpheme is simply a sound or sounds that have a meaning, like a word mommy. The word mommies, however, has two morphemes mommy and –s. Children at this stage can recognize that the –s means more than one. They also begin to associate that meaning with other words when the sound is added.

Stage Three: Learning Sentences. During this stage, children learn how to create sentences. That means they can put words in the correct order. For example, they learn that in English we say I want a cookie and I want a chocolate cookie, not Want I a cookie or I want cookie chocolate. Children also learn the difference between grammatical correctness and meaning. Children will know that although the sentence is grammatically correct, it doesn’t make sense. They know that green is a color and can't, therefore, be colorless.

Language Learning . There is no genetic code that leads a child to speak English or Spanish or Japanese. Language is learned. We are born with the capacity to make 40 sounds and our genetics allows our brain to make associations between sounds and objects, actions, or ideas. The combination of these capabilities allows the creation of language. Sounds come to have meaning. The babbling sound ma - ma - ma of the infant becomes mama, and then mother. In the first years of life children listen, practice, and learn. The amusing sounds of a young toddler practicing language in seemingly meaningless chatter is really their modeling of the rhythm, tone, volume, and non-verbal expressions they see in us.
What is different about teaching a foreign language to children, in contrast to teaching adults or adolescents? Some differences are immediately obvious, children are often more enthusiastic and lively as learners. They want to please the teacher rather than their peer group. They will have a go at an activity even when they do not quite understand why or how. However, they also lose interest more quickly and are less able to keep themselves motivated on tasks they find difficult. Children do not find it as easy to use language to talk about language; in other words, they do not have the same access as older learners to metalanguage that teachers can use to explain about grammar or discourse⁵. Children often seem less embarrassed than adults at talking in a new language, and their lack of inhibition seems to help them get a more native-like accent. But these are generalizations which hide the detail of different children, and of the skills involved in teaching them. We need to unpack the generalizations to find out what lies underneath as characteristic of children as language learners. We will find that important differences do arise from the linguistic, psychological and social development of the learners, and that, as a result, we need to adjust the way we think about the language we teach and the classroom activities we use. Although conventional language teaching terms like grammar and listening are used in connection with
the young learner classroom, understanding of what these mean to the children who are learning them may need to differ from how they are understood in mainstream language teaching. You could say that children have an advantage from the start, because they start learning a language without even deciding to. They’ll most likely be having lessons at school, or their parents will be teaching them. This means that they will be having regular contact with the target language. If they are learning it at home, they may well also be surrounded by family speaking the language, as well as an abundance of reading and listening resources. In this case, the language is around them all the time, free of charge. Out of all the children that learn, say, English at school, there are not many that are going to just absorb the language like many adults claim they are magically capable of. I learned English at school, as part of a club that taught me for a couple of years. By the time I reached high school, I hardly remembered a thing! Often adults see children as some kind of magic sponges, but that simply isn’t always the case. It is important to note that although children get the opportunity to learn languages at school, in most cases this isn’t what makes them fluent. Language with all of its magnificent complexity- is one of the greatest gifts we give our children. Yet, we so often treat our verbal communication with children in a casual way. It is a misconception that children learn language passively. Language acquisition is a product of active, repetitive, and complex learning. The child's brain is learning and changing more during language acquisition in the first six years of life than during any other cognitive ability he is working to acquire. How much easier this learning process can be for children when adults are active participants. Adults help children learn language primarily by talking with them. It happens when a mother coos and baby-talks with her child. It happens when a father listens to the fractured, rambling, breathless story of his 3-year-old. It happens when a teacher patiently repeats instructions to an inattentive student.