What's to be a young language learner?

I. The Young Learner

What's to be a young language learner?

Young language learners are those who are learning a foreign or a second language, they are between the ages of approximately five and twelve. Young language learners may be foreign language learners, learning a language in a situation where the language is seldom heard outside the classroom like here in our country.

Children really like to play and have fun, but they also like to learn new things. When children are learning a foreign language, sometimes it is kind of easy that they learn that language because they absorb almost everything at the age of six until eleven or twelve.

Well, teaching children has been one of the best experiences that I have ever had. It was amazing, but at the same time it was kind of difficult and hard.

I had one class with 19 students and the other one with 25 students. At the beginning I was so nervous, but in the observation I could notice that there were some students who did not like to participate too much and that there were some others who really liked to participate and were very interactive.

So I think that the observation helped me to know them more and to realize what kind of activities they like to do the most.

I started to teach them the basic colors by showing a poster with some draws representing the colors, for example, there was the sun representing the color yellow, an apple representing the color red, a lemon for color green, and so on.

Then, I played a short song about the basic colors. They asked me to play it again, so I did it. I realized that they were learning so quickly; also, they were putting into practice what they have learned. Since the poster and the song called their attention, they were learning a lot.

I taught them the colors, numbers, parts of the body, mood, shapes, family members, some animals, etc.

When I was teaching them the mood, everyone wanted to participate because we played a game in which someone had to pass to the front and had to perform a mood. The other children had to guess what mood was.

Also, once I made up my own bingo game; my children really enjoyed that game. They wanted to play it a lot of times even when some of them never won the game.

It is funny to think that children are very different from young adults or teenagers because they really like to participate in everything, but we as young adults are afraid or shy sometimes and we do not like to participate.

I really enjoyed teaching even thought there were occasions in which I did not what to do. But I would like to teach them again.  

By: Yohana Burgos