How to Teach English to Young Learners
Young learners often learn language naturally. Thus, in order to help them acquire English knowledge in the best way, teachers must have patience and creative teaching methods. Young learners often prefer to learn from eye-catching activities, sounds, and images rather than a boring, wordy lesson. You need to be active and funny when teaching English for them. If you want to hold the key to teach English to young learners in the most successful way, get some tips in the following shared article.
Fun methods to teach English to young learners
1. Understand what young learners want
Young learners often do not have any personal reason to learn English. At this age, they certainly don’t know the importance of foreign language classes. English is simply one of the subjects that they need to study at school or that their parents want them to learn it. The knowledge they are taught during this time will form their perceptions and solid foundation in the future.
At this early age, young learners often have very short periods of time to focus on lessons and they are easily distracted. Therefore, you should design lectures that are short, basic and easy to understand. Furthermore, you shouldn’t teach them too much reading and writing skills but instead teach more listening and speaking English skills.
You can teach them English vocabulary associated with their classroom activities. Some words can be:
“Please stand up” and say “Hello, teacher” – when the teacher entered the class.
“Please sit down” – when the teacher asks them to sit down.
“Keep silent” while you are talking.
“Please raise your hands” – when they want to ask something or answer the teacher’s question, etc.
You should practice for them to listen and repeat these words throughout the process of learning English.
When you teach English to young learners, you had better impart them how to greet and get acquainted with friends. Let them move around the class and speak English with classmates. You could also give them homework by practicing greeting parents and adults.
Besides, young learners may not remember previous lessons so frequent repetition is important. Therefore, you should review what you have taught them before starting a new lesson.
See more: Teaching English – Essential skills for every teacher
2. Use pictures and illustrations to teach English to young learners
When teaching English vocabulary to young learners, remember to use colorful illustrations. Instead of writing each letter on the board, you can use pictures of the alphabet, numbers, shapes and colors to teach them pronunciation and vocabulary.
School can be frustrating for young learners. Don’t make them write too much, they won’t even open their notebooks when they come home. Let them learn English directly on the pictures. At today’s bookstores, it’s not too difficult to buy pictures of alphabet, numbers, … You can also encourage parents to buy a word puzzle for them to learn vocabulary through it. If you want to teach them to distinguish colors, have them draw and tint.
Moreover, when teaching them vocabulary about animals or any other topic, display similar images on the projector. They will find it interesting and absorb vocabulary faster.
3. Integrating music into English lessons
Young learners often absorb lessons slowly. So, you should not cram too many words into them. Image and sound are the best learning methods for young learners’ brains. Young learners are generally very enthusiastic about songs, especially they can sing along all day. Turning vocabulary, grammar and conversations into melodies in English songs. This is a great way to teach English to young learners.
When you’re writing lesson plans for young learners, do a search on Youtube to see if there’s a song that fits the topic you’re about to teaching. You can let them listen to the ABC song to teach alphabet for them. “Hello teacher” song is also a fun song to teach young learners to sing along to.
4. Teach English to young learners through cartoons
Cartoons often attract young learners by cute images and voices, lively sounds. When watching cartoons, they are not only entertained, but also increase their hearing and reflexes. You can also take them out of the classroom to immerse them in the world of movies. Adventure movies, or movies about nature in the world are also very attractive to them.
Movies with content are suitable for young learners that often contain simple, practical and easy-to-use vocabulary in everyday life.
Children learn with their eyes and ears. Through movies, they have the ability to imitate the actions and words of the characters in the movie. Therefore, be careful in choosing movies for them to watch. Looking for movies with pure content, simple vocabulary and extremely close to their lives.
5. Testing the knowledge that taught to young learners through games
Doing what’s the best so that young learners don’t feel stressed about their studies. Do not force them to memorize words mechanically and test by asking them to write vocab on the board or on paper.
Let’s create interesting games.
You ought to divide the class into several groups to play games which relate to English vocabulary or grammar, … In particular, the winning team will be rewarded with cute gifts and the losing team will implement penalties. That way, the kids will be more active in their studies because they tend to like receiving gifts and hate being punished.
6. Absolutely do not blame or scold young learners
There are different things you can do to make sure that your students learn English well, but never make them worry about making mistakes. You reprimand a child when they get things wrong, slow to learn, or don’t memorize. This will affect their confidence.
You had better encourage students to work hard and create a stress-free, constructive learning environment for them. Also, you should train them to actively ask when they don’t understand the lesson.
There is no need to assign a lot of English homework to young learners. However, keep an eye on each student’s progress so that they could know what they’ve learned and how well they’ve done it. From there, give them lots of encouragement and positive feedback.
You play an important role in helping young learners develop a strong foundation of English. Through the useful sharing above, hope that you can apply them to every English lesson. Thereby, nurturing each young person’s love of learning English, bringing them to become better at advanced English levels in the future.
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