PEI 501: English as a Foreign Language Teaching Methodology at the Elementary School Level Teaching Languages to Young Learners

(by Lynne Cameron Chapter 1)

WHA T IS DIFFERENT ABOUT TEACHING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE TO CHILDREN IN CONTRAST TO ADULTS OR ADOLESCENTS?

1. They want to please their teacher 2. They get into the activity (why or how)

3. Lose interest quickly 4. Less able to keep themselves motivated on difficult tasks 5. Do not have access to metalanguage 6. Lack of inhibition

What lies underneath as characteristic of children as language learners?

Over view of theory relevant to children's language learning

Piaget
Active learner Learning takes place though actions taken to solve problems

Accommodation and adaptation

Childs thinking and intellectual skills develop gradually

Final stage: formal, logical thinking

Implications for language learning

Children --------- adapt through experiences with objects in their environment

provides the setting for development through the opportunities it offers the child for action

 Transferring this idea to the abstract world of learning and ideas, we can think of the classroom as classroom activities as creating and offering opportunities to learners for learning.

Vigotsky
Language provides the child with a new tool opening new opportunities for doing things and organizing information

The child as social

Learning and development take place in a social context

Adults mediate the world for children and make it accessible to them

 With the help of adults, children can do much more than they can do on their own. ZPD --------Zone of proximal development

New meaning to intelligence: What a child can do alone what a child can do with skilled help

 Vigotsky saw the child as first doing things in a social context, with other people and language helping in various ways, and gradually shifting away from reliance on others to independent action and thinking.

Implications for language learning

What can a teacher do to support learning? 1. Use the idea that the adult mediates what next it is the child can learn. 2. This has applications in lesson planning and how teachers talk to pupils. 3. The new language is first used meaningfully by the teacher and pupils, and later it is transformed and internalized to become part of the individual childs language skills of knowledge.

Bruner (1983

For Bruner, language is the most important tool for cognitive growth. Scaffolding -----teachers can scaffold children in various ways.

Teacher can help children to

Attend to what is relevant

By
Suggesting Praising the significant Providing focusing activities Encouraging rehearsal Being explicit about organization

Adopt useful strategies

Remember the whole tasks and goals

Reminding Modeling Providing part-whole activites

Learning a second language

Age and second language learning: Hypothesis ----- children learn a second language better than adults Critical Period Hypothesis: young children can learn a second language effectively before puberty because their brains are still able to use the mechanisms that assisted 1st language acquisition

 CPH holds that older learners will learn language differently after this stage and particularly for accent, can never achieve the same level of proficiency.

Some studies show that there is no such cutoff point for language learning. Lightbown and Spada (1999) present some evidence for and against the CPH.

 They remind us to attend to the different needs, motivation and contexts for different groups of learners.

Advantages of starting young with foreign languages

Children who have an early start develop and maintain advantages in some, but not in all, areas of language skills. Listening comprehension benefits the most and pronunciation too but this is restricted to learning a language in a naturalistic contexts and does not necessarily apply to schoolbased learning.

 Grammatical knowledge is likely to develop more slowly for younger children.