Teaching Language to Young Learners Lynne Cameron 2001 Cambridge University Press

Misunderstandings about teaching young learners (2):

Children only need to learn simple language
It is also misleading to think that children will only learn simple language, such as colours and
numbers, nursery rhymes and songs, and talking about themselves. Of course, if that is all they are
taught, that will be all that they can learn. But children can always do more than we think they can;
they have huge learning potential, and the foreign language classroom does them a disservice if
we do not exploit that potential. Teachers often tell me that they worry about their slow learners.
When I talk to the children and watch lessons, I do see some children struggling with written
English, but more often I see fast learners who already know most of the vocabulary in their text
books and are keen on to use their English to talk about international topics like football, pop music
and clothes. Many children around the world, including those who live in isolated communities,
become part of a global community of English language users when they watch television and use
computers. Children need more than simple language in the sense that only simple topics are
covered. Children are interested, or can be interested, in topics that are complicated (like
dinosaurs and evolution), difficult (like how computers work), and abstract (like why people pollute
their own environment or commit crimes). This is one reason why, in this book, I avoid talking a socalled child-centred approach, and adopt instead a learning centred approach, hoping to avoid
patronizing children by assuming limits to their interests.
There is a second way in which children need more than simple language, and that is in terms
of language structures. It is becoming clearer and clearer that first language development builds
from a lexical base, and that grammar emerges from lexical and communicative development.
Children use supposedly difficult structures in their first languages as part of their lexical
repertoires. In foreign language teaching, some syllabuses for primary children look like rather like
watered-down secondary syllabuses, which present children with just a few of the structures
typically found early on at secondary level, such as the Present Continuous tense for describing
current actions, Simple Present for describing habitual action, and prepositions. In this way, adding
on primary level language teaching in a school system merely stretches out what has been done
before over a longer period of time. It may be more fruitful to consider the possibility of primary
level language teaching providing children changes and grows. This prospect should be of interest
and concern to secondary sectors too; as language learning begins at younger and younger ages,
children will arrive in secondary classrooms with much higher and more diverse levels of the
foreign language than teachers will have been accustomed to.