The young learner

The children have many specific characteristics that could help the teacher to find weakness and strengths as well as to develop the best atmosphere in the classroom.In our teaching practicum we have noticed a great deal of behaviors that children have, and also different ways in which they can learn appropriately a new language. Besides, children’s behaviors we must take into account the importance that the age of children have so that we might create a bond.

When we are teaching young learners, we can find out that some kids do not like to work in group, but we know it is natural in children with ages from four to six to be quite restless; therefore, we decided to rearrange the desks for every child stays all the time near of one another. In this manner, we could manage an actively either for the whole class, for pairs work or just groups work. We found out pupils were in agreement and happy doing the activity in that way, and we as English language practitioners felt satisfied because we got our pupils to work in groups.

Another behavior which needed special care was that the young learner is not used to following rules. We had to make an extra effort to catch their attention using a wide variety of tools, such as, puppets, flash cards, paper dolls; we were also using a class mascot called Pepita which based on our opinion was a very useful tool in the classroom.

We also have to mention that if you make full use of these tools for sure you will get different results, but they will depend on what you want is that the pupil speaks, or if what you want is to develop listening abilities on the children you can tell them a short tale that catch their attention at that very moment.

Since our point of view being a young language learner must be a hilarious experience so that the pupil’s attitude will be available for the learning experience.