Teaching Language to Young Learners - Lynne Cameron

Teaching Language to Young Learners – Lynne Cameron – 2001 – Cambridge University Press

Misunderstandings about teaching young learners (2): Children only need to learn simple language It is also misleading to think that children will only learn simple language, such as colours and numbers, nursery rhymes and songs, and talking about themselves. Of course, if that is all they are taught, that will be all that they can learn. But children can always do more than we think they can; they have huge learning potential, and the foreign language classroom does them a disservice if we do not exploit that potential. Teachers often tell me that they worry about their ‘slow learners’. When I talk to the children and watch lessons, I do see some children struggling with written English, but more often I see ‘fast’ learners who already know most of the vocabulary in their text books and are keen on to use their English to talk about international topics like football, pop music and clothes. Many children around the world, including those who live in isolated communities, become part of a global community of English language users when they watch television and use computers. Children need more than ‘simple’ language in the sense that only ‘simple’ topics are covered. Children are interested, or can be interested, in topics that are complicated (like dinosaurs and evolution), difficult (like how computers work), and abstract (like why people pollute their own environment or commit crimes). This is one reason why, in this book, I avoid talking a socalled ‘child-centred’ approach, and adopt instead a learning centred approach, hoping to avoid patronizing children by assuming limits to their interests. There is a second way in which children need more than ‘simple’ language, and that is in terms of language structures. It is becoming clearer and clearer that first language development builds from a lexical base, and that grammar emerges from lexical and communicative development. Children use supposedly ‘difficult’ structures in their first languages as part of their lexical repertoires. In foreign language teaching, some syllabuses for primary children look like rather like watered-down secondary syllabuses, which present children with just a few of the structures typically found early on at secondary level, such as the Present Continuous tense for describing current actions, Simple Present for describing habitual action, and prepositions. In this way, adding on primary level language teaching in a school system merely stretches out what has been done before over a longer period of time. It may be more fruitful to consider the possibility of primary level language teaching providing children changes and grows. This prospect should be of interest and concern to secondary sectors too; as language learning begins at younger and younger ages, children will arrive in secondary classrooms with much higher and more diverse levels of the foreign language than teachers will have been accustomed to.