The Best Method to Teach Young Learners

940 Words4 Pages
TFL 329 Teaching Young Learners Is there a best method to teach an L2 to children? For centuries, people in all societies and cultures have had an interest in exceptional performance, exceptional ways and methods in teaching. Tones of books, scientific researches, experiments, and works have been written and done. Thousands of scholars are still trying to find out if there is a best way or method to teach. Let’s try to find out if there a best method to teach a target language to children. Teaching young learners is unique and challenging experience. But it also fun and interesting. And of course the thing that must be considered is that children are different from adults. “Compared to adults, children are more energetic, have shorter attention spans, and learn language according to specific stages of development. The key to teaching English to children is to understand the principles of language acquisition and apply it in ways that keep children motivated to learn .Children's world is playing and imitating” (Masoud Hashemi). First of all, we should not forget that children acquire language. From a very young age children pick up on the phonetics and speech patterns of the language they hear every day in their home environment. And second language is not an exception. One of the biggest keys to teaching child target language is to spend time talking with him. “Adults help children learn language primarily by talking with them,” says Bruce D. Perry, PhD. Every conversation matters, and children pick up words and sentences structure from the language they hear from the people around them. Personally, I believe that having conversations with children is important. Without conversations, they do not understand how to put the language they are learning together. As adults, even high level speakers of English can struggle with this. Just before starting a
Open Document