How can young children best learn languages? The British Council's Tracey Chapelton explains how parents of young children can lay the foundations for success. Children's brains are highly active Your child is unique, but what all children have in common is natural curiosity and an innate ability to learn. Kuhl states that babies and young children are geniuses at acquiring a second language. By exposing children to other languages at an early age, you are giving them the opportunity to tap into their natural ability to hear and distinguish the sounds of other languages, and their capacity to make sense of what they are hearing. Children make language-learning look easy Communication is something that children do to help them achieve something else, and they are blissfully unaware of the enormous amount of learning taking place. Children's emotional environment is important for learning In your child’s early years, the emotional environment is just as important as the physical environment. How can we lay the foundations for success?
Motivating teenagers I will link three practical classroom activities to the ideas of American Psychologist Carl Rogers. The ideas of Carl Rogers Types of motivation and teenagers Ways to improve motivation:Journals - empathy Using photos - authenticity Music - acceptance The ideas of Carl Rogers Rogers (1957) outlined 3 attitudinal qualities that a teacher, or in his words, a facilitator, should have to assist the learning process. They are empathy (seeing things from the students' viewpoint), authenticity (being yourself) and acceptance (of students' ideas and opinions). Types of motivation and teenagers It is widely agreed that motivation has a great effect on a student's capacity to learn. Ways to improve motivation Journals - Empathy Journal writing can create wonderful opportunities to find out more about your students' lives. Joanna Budden, British Council, Spain I will link three practical classroom activities to the ideas of American Psychologist Carl Rogers. Ways to improve motivation
6 Types of Play: How Children's Play Becomes More Social Play is a serious business. The pioneering developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky thought that, in the preschool years, play is the leading source of development. Through play children learn and practice many basic social skills. They develop a sense of self, learn to interact with other children, how to make friends, how to lie and how to role-play. The classic study of how play develops in children was carried out by Mildred Parten in the late 1920s at the Institute of Child Development in Minnesota. She closely observed children between the ages of 2 and 5 years and categorised the types of play. Parten collected data by systematically sampling the children’s behaviour. The thing to notice is that the first four types of play don’t involve much interaction with others, while the last two do. Unoccupied play: the child is relatively stationary and appears to be performing random movements with no apparent purpose. » This is part of a series on 10 crucial child psychology studies. Reference
ESL Jeopardy: How to play this staple of the TEFL classroom - ESL Jeopardy is a version of the popular board game. It’s a fun and easy to play quiz game, and it’s great for reviewing vocabulary and certain grammar forms. It ranks alongside Taboo as one of the most played games in the TEFL classroom. It’s a great way to round off the week or to save for the last day of the course. You will need five separate categories of questions and for each category five or six questions ranging in difficulty from easy ($100) to difficult ($600). First, draw the Jeopardy grid on the board as in the above diagram. See below, for several sets of pre-written Jeopardy questions which you can use to play this game. Split students into teams of three or four, with two or three teams being optimal. The first team starts and chooses a category and an amount, depending on how confident they are in being able to answer the question. If the team answers incorrectly, the square stays open and another team or the same team can attempt to answer it in a later round. Related
How Children Learn to Talk Have you ever wondered how children learn to talk? Many people, when asked that question, respond that they do it by imitating. This is at least partially true. Without imitation, we couldn't account for the fact that children in Texas usually learn Texan English, children in Paris usually learn Parisian French, and not vice versa. But imitation as an answer doesn't take us very far. For one thing, children routinely say things they've never heard: "Mommy, come quick—Waldo swallowed a frog!" At this point some would amend their position to say that children don't imitate others sentence by sentence. At any given point in development, a child's speech more closely resembles the speech of other children at the same stage of development than it does the speech of adults in the child's environment—even if there are not other children around. What do children do as they learn to talk? Imagine that you are in a kitchen with a two-year-old and his mother. Child: Want other one spoon, Daddy.
Today In History - Historical Facts & Events How young children learn English as another language By Opal Dunn, educational consultant and author Introduction Young children are natural language acquirers; they are self-motivated to pick up language without conscious learning, unlike adolescents and adults. They have the ability to imitate pronunciation and work out the rules for themselves. Any idea that learning to talk in English is difficult does not occur to them unless it’s suggested by adults, who themselves probably learned English academically at a later age through grammar-based text books. Read the notes below about young children learning English as another language. The advantages of beginning early Young children are still using their individual, innate language-learning strategies to acquire their home language and soon find they can also use these strategies to pick up English. Stages in picking up English Spoken language comes naturally before reading and writing. Understanding Frustration Mistakes Gender differences Language-learning environments Reading Parental support
Video and young learners 1 Some ideas for the kinds of video suitable for young learners are also given. The second article Video and young learners 2 will take a look at pre-viewing, while-viewing and post-viewing video activities and will be supported by three lesson plans illustrating these activities. What are the benefits of using video in the classroomDrawbacksRole of videoCriteria for selecting videoVideo typesFurther reading and bibliography What are the benefits of using video in the classroom? Children enjoy language learning with video'One of the aims of teaching English to young children is to instil in them the idea that language learning is a happy experience, and video creates an attractive enjoyable learning environment.' All Young Learners Video communicates meaning better than other mediaVideo presents language in context in ways that a cassette can't. DrawbacksThere are however a couple of potential pitfalls that teachers should watch out for. WatchabilityIs the video interesting? Video types