1. “Teaching Language to
Young Learners”
Taking a learning-centered
perspective
Pichilef Andrea
Caldentey Agustin
Practice II
2012

2. General charcteristics of young
learners
• Enthusiastic and lively
• They want to please the teacher, rather
than peer group.
• Even when they do not understand why or
how to do an activity, they will have a go at
it
• Loose interest more quickly.
• Do not find it easy to use language to talk
about language.
• Lack of inhibition at talking in a new
language.

3. However…
Important differences arise from the
linguistic, psychological and social
development of the learners.
We, as teachers, need to adjust the
way we think about the language and
the classrooms activities we use.

4. Two teaching perspectives
• Learning Centered: lessons and activities
tuned to the demands of the next text
book unit, or to the interests of the
teacher.
• Learner Centered: Knowledge about the
children’s learning is central to effective
teaching.
Nevertheless, it is important to bare in mind
the time available in schools for language
teaching.

5. Piaget
Main concern: how young children function in the
world surrounding them and how this influences
their mental development.
The child is continually interacting with the world
around her/him, solving problems that are
presented by the environment.
Knowledge is actively constructed and thought is
seen as deriving from action

6. Two ways of development
Assimilation and Accomodation
• Assimilation happens when action takes
place without any change to the child.
• Accomodation involves the child adjusting
to features of the enviroment.
These two adaptive processes occur
together.
In 2LL accomodation takes the label of
“restructuring” and refers to the re-
organisation of mental representations of
a language.

7. Critics to Piaget’s theory
According to Piaget, “child’s thinking develop
as a gradual growth of knowledge and
intellectual skills towards a final stage (11
years old) of formal, logical thinking”
This explanation has been critiziced for not
being sufficiently child-friendly, and for
underestimating what children are capable
of.

8. Implications of Piagetian theory
for language learning
Piaget considers children as active learners
and thinkers who construct their own
knowledge from working with objects or
ideas.
Therefore we can think of children as
“active sense makers”. Though their
sense making is limited by their
experiences, it is a key concept for
teachers to understand how they react to
tasks.

9. The world is offering
opportunities for learning
As children take every obstacle
as an opportunity to learn,
teachers should think of the
classroom and classroom
activities as creating and
offering such opportunities.