E-DOĞRU STATÜ
DOĞRU STATÜ EĞİTİM KURUMLARI
TIPS FOR TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS
07 Nisan 2023
Introduction
Have you ever pondered the question of what to do in order to improve your teaching skills? You may be in the right place! This edublog will mainly be about my three pieces of advice for educators that I came up with while reflecting on my journey of teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) to young learners. Through this journey I learnt lots of valuable lessons and they helped me in shaping my educational views. Likewise, I hope this piece of writing will also contribute to many others’ understanding of teachership. Therefore, the goal of this article is to provide three very useful teaching tips to my fellow colleagues.
1. Fun Factor
First things first I have students whose ages range between 5 and 10, I have been teaching them all about the English language. Dealing with such young children requires hardwood and dedication. You need to implement some fun activities into your lessons. These activities will help you in time management as well, if you run out of activities you can always revisit some fun games and activities that your student enjoys but make sure you are not repeating yourself over and over.
2.Interaction is the Key
In the process of teaching young learners I realized that while designing activities for young learners, one of the most important things to keep in mind is engaging everybody. Attention span of an average individual is about ten minutes, when it comes to children it is even shorter. As a result Teachers must keep every student active during games and activities. If one student is performing a task others can cheer or take other kinds of responsibilities. Long story short, choosing or designing engaging activities saves lives!
3. Surround students with Language
Exposure to target language plays a vital role in language acquisition; however, it is also an effective way of learning. In this regard, as tutors we should expose our learners to the language as much as possible. You can use visual aids, realia and especially authentic materials, depending on your choice and your students’ needs. While providing them with the exposure, always take your students’ background knowledge into consideration.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, we teachers are also learning from our students, the source of those aforementioned tips were actually my own observations. Thus, by monitoring your students, you can come up with your own “useful tips” and you can turn them into your key principles for teaching.