Supporting Independence:Teaching English to young learners within a three-stage learning journey

Print this article

This article will consider three stages which young language learners travel through, from being highly dependent on the teacher, then becoming supportive and actively contributing input into the activities they are involved in in the classroom, until finally learners become independent users of the target language.

The final stage of independence is usually a long way down the language learning road for most of our learners and, it would seem, with young language learners the majority of teaching and learning takes place within the second or middle stage of this three-stage journey – the supported independence stage.

Therefore, in this article we will particularly consider this stage and take a look at some example activities found in the first two stages for our young learners.

The language learning journey

Learning anything new is a journey. I will discuss the journey that our young language learners will be travelling on below, but, first, it may be valuable for us to consider why we teach foreign languages to young learners? (by ‘young’ here I mean learners up to the age of about twelve and still in school).

Our present understanding of how children learn is that they learn to think, problem solve, question and try to make sense of things around them best when they interact with the things they are being introduced to.

Learning is successful when the learners have the guidance, intellectual and emotional support created by a teacher who understands how learners learn and can provide the most suitable learning environment and teaching activities to support this learning.

This teacher will be able to introduce the target subject in an interactive and meaningful way for the learners, whilst at the same time will model learning, questioning and thinking and by doing so will help the children develop learning and thinking skills of their own.

They will therefore see their role as a mentor or guide rather than a disciplinarian or examiner.

If we introduce foreign language teaching to our young learners, then we should, presumably, do so in the same way as we introduce any other subjects to them i.e. show them how this target language can interact with their own lives.

We would lay the foundations of this language use, show them how this new language can have a link with their everyday lives and introduce the idea that it is positive to speak other languages and communicate more easily in a world which is becoming ‘smaller’.

What would we teach in the target language?

First and foremost, the structure of the target language is not what we would want the young learners to focus on at the beginning of their language learning journey.

We would want them to focus, initially, on the way to communicate with this new language, just as we would want them to notice how, in science, the seeds grow first, or that cutting an orange into four, in mathematics, shows you what quarters are and so on.

We would be introducing the young learners to how this subject can be linked to their own lives and can have meaning for them. We would also be laying the foundation for further language learning to come.

Only when the children have the ability to communicate by using the target language can we then start introducing them to some of the ‘nitty gritty’ of how that language works.

These concepts are usually introduced later in their cognitive development and when they can comfortably interact with the knowledge base in the subject, in order to, then, fully understand that ‘nitty gritty’ of the subject.

In other words, we must make sure that our learners can handle the tools of learning and interact comfortably with any subject before we ask them to strip down what they are learning and look at its component parts.

Do we learn to drive by stripping down the car engine first and putting it back together before we get behind the wheel?

Of course not, because if we did that our roads would be a great deal emptier! If we ask young language learners to strip down the subject itself before they could actually use and understand what they can do with it, they would rapidly become very de-motivated and disinterested in that subject, I believe.

The language learning journey for our young learners

So, we are taking our young language learners on a three-stage journey from total dependence as learners of the language to the goal, long-term, of independence in that target language.

However, the majority of the language learning will take place in the supported independence stage, the second or middle stage of this lengthy journey.

The whole journey can be imagined as a continuum along which, over the years in which they are language learning, our learners move from dependence (needing a lot of support from the teacher) to supported independence needing less teacher support and some student involvement as they move along it until they finally, and after a fairly lengthy journey, become fully independent users of that language.

The dependence stage in any language learning journey is at the very beginning when the teacher is the ‘knower’ of the language and gives the learner more or less all the interaction and knowledge of the target language through the activities they use in the classroom.

If we think about the first, or dependence stage, we can understand that this can be particularly teacher-led and teacher-controlled as the learners have no knowledge, as yet, of the subject.

For example, the teacher may ask the children to carry out an activity in which they are in pairs and ask and answer each other with dialogue or ‘chunks’ of language which has been given to them in advance of the activity, by the teacher, such as:

Next Page>>

<< Back