TEYL - Demands and Challenges

Teaching English to Young Learners is now a big bussiness not only in Indonesia, but also in a greater area. Governments and the authorities are very much aware about this and have issued different policies to cater the demands.

Some principles of teaching English to Young Learners include:
*Involve balanced VAK
*Be in clear and meaningful context
*Involve a variety of activities -stir and settle
*Involve interaction
*Be based on real language use
*Involve the four skills integratively
*Make children feel that the language they learn is theirs

If you claim yourself a teacher of young learner, are you really ready to teach children accordingly?

Cooperative Learning for Young Learners

According to FORBES 500, in the years of 2000, what the occupational world requires employees who have strong interpersonal skills, problem solving capacity and teamwork.
What can we do to help our chidren develop those skills? Especially, as English teachers, what can we do?

One of the ways by applying Cooperative Learning in the teaching. Cooperative Learning refers to a set of instructional methods in which students work in small, mixed-ability learning teams. The students in each team are responsible not only for learning the material being taught, but also for helping their teammates learn. But,
Cooperative Learning for Young Learners, is it possible?

The answer is, of course it is. However, it requires hard works from the teachers' side. Heads On, Hearts On, Hands On. Teachers need to walk the extra miles from generating ideas and strategies, not just doing what the average teachers do. That's Heads on. In designing the activities, teachers need to keep on thinking of the students' learning styles and strategies. Then, during the classroom activities, teachers are taking active role, instructing, monitoring and prompting assistance necessarily.

We tried it out in a one day workhop at Universitas Pakuan Bogor, attended by around 100 teachers. We did work hard, but we also had a very good time together.

Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom

Each child has his or her own characteristics.
The theory of mulitple intelligences (Gardner, 1993) seems to harbor a number of educational implications that are worthy of consideration. Armstrong (1994) has synthesized these ideas into four key points that educators find attrative about the theory.
1. Each person possesses all eight intelligences. All the eight function together in unique ways.
2. Intelligences can be developed. They change with age, training, and/or experienvces.
3. Intelligences work together in complex ways. Intelligences are always interacting with each other.
4. There are many different wasy to be intelligent. There is no set standard of attributes that one must have in order to be considered intelligent.

Now the question is: how can we apply all of those into classroom day to day teaching, so that each may learn and no one is left behind?

I gave workshops in the RELO Roundtable Discussion session, at LBI FBS UI, KOLITA 7 Atmajaya University, the TEFLIN Conference at UIN Jakarta, and also writing and faciltating workshops for Elementary School teachers. The book is entitled: "Becoming a Creative TEacher: A MAnual for Elementary School Teachers in Indonesia

Story Telling for Young Learners

Storytelling brings together aspects of the primary curriculum. Storytelling gives chances to learners to explore shapes, size, textures, causes & effect, and it also serves as an extension to primary subjects: science, geography, history. Through storytelling learners learn making sense of the world, emotional and social development. Stories also play as stimulus to the imagination.

Getting the students involved in the story, not just repeating after the teacher or the storyteller is an additional challenge. However, this can be done in different ways. At the same time, they are learning the meaning of the words.

Teaching English to Young Learners thru Songs

Children naturally love singing or chanting, and do not really care if they are off tone. The use of songs in teaching gives variety to a lesson, provides practice in pronunciation, intonation, structure and vocabulary. Songs also adds enjoyment, increases learners’ motivation and promotes maximum participation. To add to it, songs can be used to create children or group identity.

Teaching English using songs is NOT about the product. No problem even if you are off tone. It is part of the process of language learning, encouraging learners to own simple and mechanical language, involving their moods. Besides having the power dramatize the language, songs also serve as opportunities for the shy students to hide their character. Usually, through songs, students actively involved in the learning process

TEYL through Arts and Crafts

Through arts and crafts, teachers promote the learners’ personal development, help them learn English and to co-operate. It provides chances for learners’ to learn meaning while making, and extend experience and understanding the world and doing it through a foreign language.

Teaching English to Young Learners

As English is being introduced into primary classrooms round the world, more and more teachers are being asked to teach English to Young Learners. In some situations, the teachers are not really properly prepared pedagogically nor academically. In others, the teachers do not even know what to do, so the learning-teaching interaction is treated like adult classes.
Children learn better than adult so foreign language learning in school should be started at as early an age as possible. Some people do not buy this belief. Adult and children learn differently and use different strategies, and so there is not better or worse. The same thing applies to the myth that adults have a longer concentration span than children. It is true that some adult develop longer time span, but in general it is not really significant. If adult can do a certain activity in a longer time span it is mainly because they have learned more ethics and able to regulate themselves compared to children.
Children have an enormous capacity for finding and making fun. Sometimes, it has to be said, they choose the most convenient moments to indulge it. So, in teaching young learners, we need to put the element of fun as the center of all learning teaching activities.

Classroom Language

Teachers often use languages that are not suitable for classroom settings. Some ither teachers ware confused of what to say in certain situations and end up saying confusing instructions to the students. What are the examples of Classroom Languages? Should Classroom Language be taught in the pre-teaching classes or teachers' training institutions, or will it grow with the direct classroom experiences?