Teaching children – Essential teaching skills and activities – Teaching teenagers

Paul Murphy

7 years ago

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In this (bonus) Teaching Young and Younger Learners Unit, we will be taking a look at some of the key requirements when teaching English to children and teenagers. It is essential that you thoroughly read through all the information presented within this unit, before then completing the Unit Quiz and graduating from the methodology section of this course. If you have any unit-related questions, please contact your personal tutor through the CONTACT LESSON TEACHER button. Good luck and we hope you enjoy completing this final section of the course! 🙂

Young learners seem to be getting younger and younger! In many countries, second language learning used to be mostly a secondary school preserve – but there has been a definite trend towards teaching primary learners at lower and lower ages. In many locations there are even widespread nursery-level language classes. When someone reported, a few years back, that a famous examination board was about to launch a new English exam for learners in the womb, it sounded almost believable. These changes are based on the belief that the younger you start, the more chance you have of making the learning successful. If there really is a critical age – up to which it is natural and easy to acquire a second or third language – and after which it is much harder to – then it does seem to make sense to exploit this. After all, young children who are brought up in bilingual households often speak both languages to native-speaker level; why shouldn’t a similar effect be achievable in schools? A stronger reason for teaching English to younger learners may simply be that starting early will give them many more years at school in which to develop and improve their language skills. By the time they reach higher levels in secondary many will be very competent users.

The main features that characterize young learners:

Children are keen. Children are noisy. Children can be chatterboxes. Children want to learn new things. Children like to experiment. Children are curious. Children get easily excited. Children want to have fun. Children have a great sense of humor. Children love attention. Children can’t concentrate for very long. Children can be hard to calm down.
Children don’t respond very well to explicit input and work on language systems (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation). They want to use language, not to study it in its own right.
Children may not see the point of English. But they do see the point of doing interesting tasks, games and activities.

Very young learners (pre-school and lower primary).

Approaches with low age groups will reflect the kind of work typically being done in the rest of their school day – just that it will be done in English rather than in the first language.

Teachers can:

tell stories (with lots of use of pictures, gestures, facial expressions, mime, puppets and toys).
sing songs and nursery rhymes with children – especially action songs that involve participation from the children (for example: ‘The Wheels on the Bus.’)
get children to act out stories and songs following the teacher’s model.
do practical tasks (painting, coloring, making things, looking after pets and plants) but with instructions and help in English.
help children learn basic skills (recognizing alphabetic letters and associating them with objects or picture, counting coconuts).
run simple games using limited vocabulary (musical games, walking around games).
give listen and do tasks (draw a cat, make a noise like a cat, touch your nose).

Please note that at this age the children will not have reading and writing skills in their first language, so text-based work may be unsuitable.

Middle and higher primary.

Once students are above a certain age you may well find that your school gives you a course book that has traditional units on different topics and works on an explicit grammar and vocabulary focus. You may also find that students are expected to pass tests that check on their ability to recognize, name and manipulate specific language items.

This means that you have to decide a serious question: how do you believe that children learn a second language? If you feel that the course book has a valid approach, then you may end up using it for a large amount of the class time. If you feel that children need a more active, more in-the-classroom experience of activities and tasks, then you may need to find a way to use the book only as much as absolutely necessary and devise or find other activities that reflect your own beliefs.

Whichever way you go, here are some ideas for working with such classes:

Find tasks and activities that are exciting and motivating in their own right. Where possible, go for active tasks, physical tasks, dressing-up tasks, moving-walking-hands-on tasks. Give students the language they need to do the task.
Don’t just talk. Use pictures, models, short videos, board drawing, toys.
Don’t worry too much about the children’s accurate production. Aim initially for listening and understanding.
Think very carefully about whether you really need to do some (or any) actual input or explanation about grammar and vocabulary. Might it be enough to integrate all language work into the tasks so that children can understand and use the language without further analysis?
Don’t expect immediate (or even long-term) student use of English. Just keep using English yourself. When a child says something to you in their language, reply in English.
Keep activities short. Plan for variety and frequent changes of focus, working modes and pace.
Keep much of the focus on the children’s life and things they understand rather than abstract or hard-to-grasp concepts.

Some popular ideas for young learner classes:

Teach around a topic.

If you decide not to get tied to a course book, a strong alternative is to choose a theme or topic to give shape to each week’s work. Explore it from a range of different angles, choosing a wide variety of practical activities. For example, with the topic of shops, students could make a pretend shop in the classroom, write names and price labels for different items, match words cards to shop items, design posters to advertise their shop, read a story about a girl who goes shopping with her dad, look at photos of shops in the past and guess what they sold – and so on.

Teach around a book.

Choose a book that you think students in your class will enjoy (for example: The Gruffalo, The BFG) . As with the teach around a topic idea, devise a range of activities that pick up themes, characters and language from the book. For example, with The Gruffalo children could design a monster, say frightening words in the most frightening way, mime walking through a forest, think of a good plan to trick a monster, find words to describe a mouse, collect rhyming words, make a monster mask, etc.

Show and tell.

Every day, ask two or three students to bring in something that is important to them. They will come to the front of class, show the object and tell everyone about it. Alternatively, ask everyone to bring something – and the show and tell can be done in small groups.

Circle time.

Everyone sits in a circle. Some basic politeness ground rules are established (for example, one person speaks at a time). A topic is given by the teacher (for example: Something I enjoyed in school this week). The teacher leads by giving an example, and then, going round the circle, each person says something on the topic. Translate if students can’t say what they want to in English.

Total Physical Response (TPR).

The teacher gives a series of imperative instructions (for example: Stand up, shake hands with someone, walk to the front of the room). As each instruction is given, the teacher shows the movement him/herself and the children copy it. Don’t worry that it’s only listening to the teacher with no learner production. It’s fine because there is a huge amount of listening, understanding and internalizing going on: very rich exposure to English.

TPR fairy stories.

Tell a story as a sequence of sentences with mime-able verbs. Students copy the teacher’s actions (for example: She waved goodbye to her mother. She walked through the woods. She saw a beautiful flower. She bent down to pick it. She looked up. She saw a wolf.)

Carousel.

Select a variety of different activities and make sufficient copies of them. They should be simple enough to understand quickly. Arrange different tables around the room. Each table should have lots of copies of one of the activities (each table has a different activity on it). When the children arrive in class, they immediately form groups based at one of the tables. Each group works on the task on their desks. After a set time (for example, eight minutes) or when the teacher feels the time is right, he/she rings a bell (or taps the table or shouts) and every group stands up and moves clockwise round the room to the next table – where they can start work on the new task. The lesson proceeds in this way, with regular changes of table and task. The teacher may need to do a lot of buzzing around, assisting with understanding what to do. Students will get a lot of chances to use English in a wide range of tasks and exercises – lots of variety.

Community Language Learning (CLL).

Although a method devised for use with adults, the basic principle works well with older primary students, whether in whole-class discussion or while supervising pair or group work. Initially you will need to train students into this way of working, but after you have, it can become very effective as an everyday way of working.

CLL essentially makes you the class translator who will help students to say what they want to say. Three steps:

Allow students to say what they want to say. Encourage brief statements in their first language.
Say a good English translation yourself of what they want to say. Don’t explain anything about the grammar or vocabulary. Just model it clearly. Don’t worry if the language you say is above their supposed understanding or syllabus level. But do keep it short. If necessary, edit what they said down to a few words.
Help students to say the English version themselves. Repeat your model as often as needed. Once they have said it to the class, move on to the next speaker. No analysis or study. Write a note to record what the sentence was. (Alternatively – and even better, is to record what the student says.)

At the end you can review what everyone said, maybe preparing a handout with the whole English language conversation.

Teenage classes.

In teenage classes, the learners are discovering a range of new possibilities for themselves. They are discovering what impact they can have on the world and can be very motivated. The learners can bring a strong enthusiasm for topics they are interested in, and they can get very focused on specific things relevant to themselves. They often respond well to work that is clearly organized and takes their interest into account. But although teenage classes can be among the most interesting and exciting, they also have some reputation for being demanding on the teacher.

Why might teenage classes seem demanding on the teacher?

It’s a difficult period of life. Teenagers are often unsure about themselves and how they feel about things.
Strong emotions of various kinds may be rising and falling and these may alter the workings of some techniques and activities.
Teenagers have changing interests. They get bored quickly.
Activities might be rejected or done without personal investment because the learners feel silly or embarrassed when doing them. Basic things like speaking English in activities may become issues.
Motivation may appear to be low, especially if learners feel that they have been forced to attend something they don’t want to.
Teenagers can come across as outspoken. They may be more willing to state clearly what they think and stand up to a requirement they disagree with.
Discipline can seem to be a problem. Teenagers seem particularly averse to things that they see as imposed on them.

I’m sure that some teachers could extend this list a good few more lines! So having said that, we can conclude that the teacher of a teenage class might need to have a few specific techniques at hand for dealing with teenage-related problems – and we will suggest a few below. But before that, we would like to offer a general proposal that might apply to all classes, whether adult, child or teenage.

Personal choice and investment.

It can be put forth that many of the problems that teachers notice in teenage classes – especially ones related to boredom, discipline, answering back and rudeness – reflect issues that also exist in adult classes. It’s just that the adults are generally more restrained and do not state as openly what they think or want, and the teacher may remain unaware of the depth of feeling, disillusionment, lack of engagement or boredom. A lot of issues that surface as ill-discipline or rudeness may just reflect the fact that the learner is feeling powerless and out of touch with something that they are being required to do. There is very little chance of learners doing something with conviction or interest unless it is something that they have, at least in some degree, chosen to do. Which leads us to a general proposal that the more a learner feels that they have chosen what to do and how to do it and feels in control while working, the more they will be likely to feel engaged and to achieve something worthwhile from it.

When these things are absent or at a low level in any class, there are likely to be problems. With adults, we might get students not coming to lessons, remaining quiet and passive, writing negative feedback comments, complaining to school management and so on. With teenagers, we might get more instant, more tangible outcomes: refusals, complaints, rudeness, abdication, etc. All of which suggests that key techniques for teenage classes might include:

a willingness to listen and be flexible in response.
following the class as much as leading.
where appropriate and possible, sharing the responsibility for key decisions – topics, work methods, work rate, homework, tests, etc.
ways of getting usable feedback regularly through lessons and courses.

Teenagers also need a sense of security amid the sometimes bewildering world they are meeting, so your task would be to find a way of offering the more flexible, democratic, inclusive approaches suggested above while also providing an ordered, organized but unthreatening environment.

Some specific ideas for teenage classes.

Virtually all of the ideas and activities in this course apply equally to teenage classes as much as to adults. Here are a few extra tips:

Avoid anything that might be seen as childish to students. Many materials that adults would happily work with may be rejected by teens if they see them as unsuitable or patronizing in any way.
If whole-class work doesn’t seem to be working, try avoiding it where possible. Instead, consider the possibility of work groups – small sections of the class that work independently on tasks that you agree with them.
Experiment with a mixture of quiet, working-alone activities and activities that require active participation. Find out which individuals seem to respond better to these different kinds of work.
Avoid too many activities that put embarrassed students in the spotlight.
Select reading and listening materials from up-to-date sources that are relevant for learners: current magazines, websites, recently-released films, hit songs.
Better still, ask learners to bring in materials they want to work with.
Consider project work on topics entirely selected by the learners and involving research methods that they will find both interesting and challenging, for example: preparing a report on a live topic that interests the students.
If your school, syllabus and exam requirements allow it – and your class is keen – consider the possibility of throwing out the whole course book and syllabus and working on one very large project with a definite outcome – staging a play or show in English or preparing a local magazine in English. (This will not work if you impose the idea on students; there must be genuine investment from them.)
Be truthful. Try not to be just a spokesperson for school or society. Say what you really think about things. Explain to learners why certain activities may (or may not) be valuable. Let them agree if they want to do them or not.
Don’t get bothered when challenged. Listen and don’t feel undermined. Be prepared to back down if a strong argument is presented.
Dare to ask important questions such as, ‘What could we do in English lessons that would really be interesting for you?’
Rather than setting out with the assumption that discipline and difficulty will be the order of the day, start out with the intention of working with the learners and listening to them.
If discipline becomes a problem, as far as possible ask the learners themselves to give advice as to what should be done.Where possible negotiate and agree codes of behavior and penalties in advance of problems boiling up.

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