English Language Teaching (Young Learners)

              Children are active learners and thinkers (Piaget, 1970). Children construct knowledge from actively interacting with the physical environment in development stages. They learn through their own individual actions and exploration.

              Children construct knowledge through other people, through interaction with adults. Adults/teacher work actively with children in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).  Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is the difference between the children’s capacity to solve problems on their own and their capacity to solve them with assistance.

              Children learn through social interaction (Vygotsky, 1962). The adult’s role is very important in a child’s learning process. Like Vgotsky, Bruner focused on the importance of language in a child’s cognitive development. He shows how the adult uses “scaffolding” to guide a child’s language learning through finely-tuned talk (Cameron, 2001).

Depend on Bruner, 1983 based on his effective scaffolding, parents who scaffold effectively:

·         created interest in the task;

·         broke the task down into smaller steps;

·         kept child “on task” by reminding him of the purposes or goal;

·         pointed out the important parts of the task;

·         controlled the child’s frustration during the task;

·         modeled the task, including different ways to do the task.

              Characteristics of young learners are varied depend on their ages and environment. The young learners under 7 (of age) acquire through hearing and experiencing lots of English, in much the same way they acquire their first language. They learn things through playing. They are not consciously trying to learn new words or phrase. Young learners under 7 love playing with language sounds, imitating, and making funny noises. They are not able to organize their learning and not able to read or write in their first language. Their grammar will develop gradually on its own when exposed to lots of English in context.

              On the other hand, young learners attain the age of 7 – 12 are learning to read and write in their first language. They are developing as thinkers. Young learners aged 7 to 12 understand the difference between the real and imaginary, they can plan and organize how best to carry out an activity. They can work with others and learn from others. They also can be reliable and take responsibility for class activities and routines.

              Although children may use similar processes for acquiring first language and second language, the environment for first language and second language acquisition can be quite different (Brewster, Ellis & Girard, 2004).

              In first language (L1) environment, the language highly contextualized and in the real world the language used is authentic so the learner highly motivated. On the contrary, in second language (L2) environment, the language more decontextualized. In the classroom, the language used tends to be artificial so the learners may not be highly motivated.

              Therefore, it is important to remember that an early start alone will not necessarily improve children’s ability to learn English. It is also very important that second language (L2) instruction include language structures that are presented within a context that is meaningful and communicative.

            Children neither just learning to read nor write, but for fluent learning and to be able to read literature, thinks and writes about ideas. These things are covered cognitive and affective domain. The children are also need to have development of psychomotor domain which are includes physical movement, coordination and use of the motor-skill areas. The children have to getting of best of those things and learn deeply in balance, because deep experiences with deep help grow deep people and also less easily fooled in a wide variety of areas.