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TEACHING ACROSS AGE LEVELS - Coggle Diagram
TEACHING ACROSS AGE LEVELS
Difference Adult/Children
Children
The contrast between the child’s spontaneous, peripheral attention to language forms.
Children’s fluency and naturalness are often better than adults.
Adults
Adults can learn and retain a larger vocabulary.
The adult’s tendency to give overt, focal awareness of and attention.
They can utilize various deductive and abstract processes to shortcut learning.
Five categories
may help give some practical approaches to teaching children.
Sensory input
Go well beyond the visual and auditory modes that may be sufficient for an adult classroom.
• Pepper your lessons with physical activity, such as having students act out things (role-play).
• Sensory aids help children to internalize concepts. The smell of flowers, the touch of plants, and liberal doses of audiovisual stimuli are all important elements in children’s language teaching.
• Remember children will attend very sensitively to your facial expressions, gestures, and other elements of your body language.
Affective Factors
• Help your students to laugh with each other at various mistakes that they all make.
• Be patient and supportive in order to build self-esteem. At the same time be firm in your expectations of students.
• Elicit as much oral participation as possible to try out the newly introduced language.
Attention Span
Your job is to make them interesting, lively, and fun.
• Children's activities need to be designed to capture their immediate interest.
• A lesson needs to keep interested and attention alive.
• A sense of humor will go a long way to keep children laughing and learning. Put yourself in their shoes.
Authentic, Meaningful Language
• Be real; be genuine. Show that you truly enjoy them.
• Language needs to be firmly context embedded.
• Capitalize on the interrelationships among the various skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) for reinforcement.
Intellectual development
• Don’t explain grammar using terms like “present progressive” or “relative clause.”
• To make a statement into a question, you add a do or does. Should be avoided.
• Certain more difficult concepts or patterns require more repetition, short, snappy drills may be very helpful.
Teaching adults: The “adult advantage”?
Adults have acquired self-confidence not found in children.
The adults’ cognitive abilities, they can at least occasionally deal with language that isn’t embedded in a “here and now” context.
Adults have superior cognitive abilities that can make them more successful in certain classroom endeavors.
Attention span.
Adults have longer attention spans for material that may not be intrinsically interesting to them.
Self-confidence.
Adults often bring a modicum of general self-confidence into a classroom, so their egos may be somewhat stronger.
Abstract thinking ability.
Adults are better able to understand a context reduced segment of language.
Vocational interests.
Adult learners, especially those in their college years and beyond, are more able to focus on their vocational future, and will derive motivational intensity from such vision.
Teaching ''in between''
The challenge is in recognizing and appreciating the enormous physical, mental, and emotional changes occurring at this age, which, ironically, is intertwined with the joy of stretching these wonderful, growing young people.
Attention spans
Potential attention spans can easily be mitigated as the learner focuses on self, appearance, sexuality, and being accepted.
Identity.
Teens are ultra-sensitive to how others perceive their changing physical and emotional selves along with their mental capabilities.
Intellectual capacity
In Piaget’s (1955, 1970) terms, the onset of abstract operational thought (age 11) means more sophisticated intellectual processing.
For teaching young teenager
• When you use explanations, definitions, and other metalanguage, make them brief, and to the point.
• Make sure your lessons have variety so that attention span is not an impeding factor.
• Appeal to your students’ immediate interests.
• Give them chances to talk about their own likes and dislikes, which will usually stimulate opinions.
• Keep self-esteem high, avoid embarrassing them by calling attention to their mistakes.
• Encourage small-group work where risks can be taken more easily.