Young Minds...
We came to our third week of this course. And for this week, Pn. Foziah wanted us to work on a group discussion about what is written by Susan Halliwel in her book under the chapter ‘Working with young learners’. As a teacher, we need to consider with the fact that children are very unique in their own way. They can be very expressive viewing things in their own way. Therefore there are quite number of skills that we as a teacher need to bear with in mind especially when working with young language learners. According to Halliwell, those skills are:
Children’s ability to grasp meaning
Children’s creative use of limited language resources
Children’s capacity of indirect learning
Children’s instinct for play and fun
The role of imagination
The instinct for interaction and talk
Thus my group and I were given the second skill which is children’s creative use limited language resources. Based on our discussion, what we can summarize from the paragraph is the fact that:
- Young children may have creative use of grammatical form and concept
- Children excel at making a little language of their mother tongue
When children try to attempt this process, they can actually build up their grasp of the language because they are actively recombining and reconstructing it for themselves.
In terms of classroom activity, teacher needs to provide these young language learners with activities that that can encourage them to communicate expressively in their own way. The activities should also be something that is unpredictable and appear encouraging to them, so that they can construct language actively.
Example of activities:
GAMES!
Because it is known that games is something that is absolutely appeal to young children as it is FUN and apart from that we may find it USEFUL as it could ENCOURAGE COMMUNICATION among the child itself and last but not least; of course it is UNPREDICTABLE because playing is something that is very natural.
So yeah… never underestimates the ability of a child.
