Week 4– Working With Young Learners 2

In this week’s Resources class, we continue the presentation from last week, which is about "Working with Young Learners”. It started with the group that presented on "The Children's ability to grasp meaning" until the group that presented on “The Role of Imagination”. It was just a continuation from where we left off last week.

These are the elements that they are presenting;

Children’s ability to grasp meaning

Young children are able to understand what is being said to them even before they understand the individual words. Intonation, gesture, facial expressions, actions and circumstances all help to tell them what the unknown words and phrases probably mean. By understanding the message in this way they start to understand the language. In later life, we all maintain this first source of understanding alongside our knowledge of the language itself. It remains a fundamental part of human communication.

Children’s instinct for play and fun

Children have an enormous capacity for finding and making fun. Sometimes, it has to be said, they choose the most inconvenient moments to indulge it. They bring a spark of individuality and of drama to much that they do. When engaged in guessing activities, for example, children nearly always inject their own element of drama into their classmates. They shuffle their cards ostentatiously under the table so that the others cannot see. They may utter an increasingly triumphant or smug “No!” as the others fail to guess. No matter how well teacher explains an activity, there is often someone in the class who produces a version of their own. Sometimes it is better than the teacher’s original idea.

The role of imagination.

Children delight in imagination and fantasy. It is more than simply a matter of enjoyment. In the primary school, children are very busy making sense of the world around them. They are identifying pattern and also deviation from that pattern. They test out their versions of the world through fantasy and confirm how the world actually is by imagining how it might be different. In the language classroom, this capacity for fantasy and imagination has a very constructive part to play.

Learning this knowledge has helped me to be a better teacher. “To learn before we can teach” I think that is the concept that I am inculcating within myself. I hope that I can learn so much more so that I can become more resourceful and better teacher in the future. Thanks to Puan Foziah for teaching us this knowledge.