Teaching Young Learners
Oxford Kids Club Tour 2007

It was exciting to see so many enthusiastic teachers all over Japan from Fukuoka to Sapporo. I met many teachers who I’ve known for many years and many more new teachers! At this tour, I was able to introduce Let’s Begin, which is Let’s Go’s brand new text for pre-school and lower elementary students. It can be used after Let’s Go Starter. Since Let’s Begin follows the Let’s Go format it will be a very easy transition into Level One.
Now, Let’s Go has nine texts, including the Picture Dictionary, as well as the many other components that come with the series such as the new Skills Book with a CD.

In my workshops, I talked about how we can teach young children between the ages of 4 to7 with Let’s Begin. We know they are right brain dominant, meaning they can do many things through imitation, repetition and play. However, it is important that play is a “learning experience with a purpose” for them, not just playing. Recently, emphasis is being made on the unlimited ability of this age group to learn many things. Each day is a growing and learning experience for them. So we can take advantage of their inquisitiveness and power of intuition to teach them English so that they will be speaking well to each other from Day One.

We did some fun activities for greetings. Saying “Hello” to the teacher is something students all do, but rarely do they say “Hello” to each other. It is a marvelous discovery for them to know that they can speak to each other in English! With rules to keep our students in order as they do the active games, the students have more time to do the activities several times and get better each time they do it. Starting off with this very simple activity, we covered other techniques of getting children to ask and answer each other in fun pair activities. Getting students to talk to each other without the teacher’s help is the first step to communication, and greeting each other is the fastest and easiest way to get them started. As they get on into their lessons, they can ask and answer questions and learn to start short conversations by themselves.

In the lecture part of my workshop, I encouraged teachers to have an intensive lesson with student participation of more than 80% speaking time in class. If the teacher is talking or explaining too much, the students will not have enough practice time to master the lesson. Our drills are fast and fun. The attention span of children is short, and so are our drills. I call them the MAT 6-second DRILL Games. By repeating many times in natural speed and rhythm, students learn to pronounce words correctly and fluently at the same time, and they actually learn better because of the intensity of the DRILL Games. Because they are focusing on the lesson, they are concentrating, and it takes much less time to learn many things than doing a long, drawn out drill. We teach them correct pronunciation and natural speed, rhythm and intonation from the start. I call this using Living English. We do not want our students to talk like robots. The importance of guidance and correction was proven in classroom experiments in immersion classes in Canada. Students who were taught by the “drip-feed” method of little at a time, speaking whenever and however they wanted to and not being corrected, were found not to be able to speak as well as the class that was taught intensively with feedback and correction on forms. ¹The “drip-feed” group were reinforcing their mistakes!

We can also get our students to make very few mistakes in speaking though our techniques which are based on my MAT (Model, Action, Talk) METHOD. How a teacher MODELS new material will influence how well the students remember. We use a modern teaching philosophy that emphasizes process focused learning where children learn how to learn. ACTION activates the right side of the brain and helps memory. Doing the 6-second DRILL Games with gestures helps memory, as with the Time on Task theory of why practice is important. TALK activates the left side of the brain, and output helps students remember better by saying things out loud.

One of the pitfalls of teaching very young children is that teachers tend to treat them like little children, even though they have been studying for more than a year. Many teachers find that teaching a new class of seven-year-olds progresses faster than the same age group that they had taught for a few years. We must remember to “up-grade” our teaching techniques and content to match their growing levels. Children know when they are learning and making progress is one of the most important intrinsic motivating factors we can give them.

We, as teachers have to be motivated, too. I hope you will be motivated to come our IIEEC-OUP Teacher Training Certificate Program in Tokyo and our other workshops throughout Japan. You will find out how to teach effectively and efficiently in many ways. See you there!

¹P. Lightbown/N. Spada. 2006. How Languages are Learned. Oxford Univ. Pr.