Strategies for Teaching Young Learners

Teaching ESL to young learners can be one of the most rewarding jobs that an educator can have, but it can also come with many challenges. It’s not always easy for children to maintain interest in a topic and keep their attention where it should be.

If you’re currently teaching a class of younger learners and struggling with it, the following five tips should help make the lesson easier for you and your students.

1. Model All New Activities 

It’s always important to remember that your students are both young and learning English. This means that they are probably not able to think in abstract terms yet, depending on their age, and they may not fully understand you when you’re providing instructions to them. For these reasons, you should always model activities and tasks first.

You should physically show students examples of how they should carry out activities. For instance, if it’s a speaking activity, then be sure to sound out example words or sentences for students and point at your mouth while doing so. 

This may seem silly at first, but this is the best way to indicate to students that you want them to speak as part of the activity. If it’s a writing task, then use the board to mimic the worksheet or book pages where you want students to write and show them what type of writing you expect to see with some examples. 

2. Use Visual Thinking Strategies 

Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is a great way to engage young learners because it allows them to exercise their creative skills while also practicing their English-speaking skills. To execute this strategy, you can simply lead the students in a discussion of a topic that interests them while using imagery to keep their interest. 

If the topic is about animals, then this process can be as simple as holding up a picture of a bird in a tree and asking students questions about it. This might include questions such as, “Why is the bird in the tree?” and “Where do baby birds live?” 

VTS can be especially effective if you ask questions that can be answered in a multitude of different ways, rather than allowing only a single correct answer. This helps to facilitate peer-to-peer scaffolding, as students can contrast and compare their answers with other students and learn new things from the responses of their peers. 

 Tips for Conducting VTS: 

• Follow-up with a lesson: while VTS activities can take place at any time during a course, with old or new material, it’s better to use it as an introduction to topics and to follow the activities with a lesson that expands more on the topic. 

• Avoid correction: to keep the activity fun where students aren’t afraid to engage, it’s generally better to hold off on correcting incorrect answers until later, when the VTS activity has concluded and the lesson has started. 

• Don’t insert information: try to encourage students to be creative and to form their thoughts around whatever visual material you’re using. The point is to help students develop their critical thinking skills, so they learn how to use English in a practical way that applies to real-world conversations or scenarios. 

3. Activate Prior Knowledge 

When teaching young learners, it’s always crucial to remember that they typically have shorter memory spans than young or middle-aged adults. Their brains are still in an early development phase, and they may therefore have difficulty retaining information. 

So before you start any new lesson, you should have a short warm-up where you review topics from previous lessons. When possible, you should try to connect these previous topics to any new topics that you’re about to introduce. 

This process activates prior knowledge, which can be looked at as a way of keeping existing ESL knowledge and skills fresh, so students don’t forget what you’ve already taught them, while also serving as a form of cognitive support so they can learn the next topic with greater ease. 

With toddlers and students between the ages of two and six, their shorter memory spans also sometimes lead to scenarios where they will return to a class after a weekend break and have forgotten that they had grown comfortable there and had fun learning things. Students who were otherwise comfortable in the classroom may feel intimidated when re-entering the very same classroom just a few days later. 

By activating prior knowledge, you’re providing students with confidence as they remember the previous lesson and what they already learned. Not only does this help to introduce the next topic in a course if you can lead from the old topic into the new one, but it can also be very encouraging for nervous students which can help them quickly re-acclimate to a learning environment. 

4. Consider Piaget’s Theory

A common theory that many teachers today follow when designing their lessons is psychologist Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. Understanding this theory can help to give you an edge when it comes to teaching young learners because you’ll know what types of materials and approaches will be most effective for your students based on their age range. 

As a simple breakdown, Piaget’s theory argues that children’s cognitive abilities go through four different stages of development as they grow older: Sensorimotor (ages 2 and below), Preoperational (ages 2 to 7), Concrete (ages 7 to 11), and Formal (ages 12 and older). 

Because most young learners fall within the preoperational stage, which, according to Piaget’s theory, is when they begin to associate pictures and words with objects, it is an absolute must that you use imagery, and as much as possible with students that fall within this age group. 

Learners in the preoperational phase are still unable to think in abstract ways, so you should generally avoid asking the students abstract questions as well, such as those that begin with, “What do you think about…,” especially when there is no corresponding imagery. While learners in the concrete phase are believed to gain even more cognitive abilities, they still think in concrete terms, so you should still use plenty of imagery for this age group as well. 

All of the following materials can be used as imagery during lessons, as long as you are linking English words or phrases to them: 

• Videos 
• Pictures 
• Flashcards 
• Chalkboard games 
• Illustrated Worksheets 

5. Use Student-Generated Materials 

Incorporating student-generated materials into your lessons is always a good idea with young learners, as long as you’re familiar with your students’ skills and abilities. These types of materials are any that students create on their own with the resources that you provide them. 

An example of this would be if you were to provide your students with random letters from the English alphabet as small pieces of colored paper and then ask students to arrange and glue these letters to a blank white sheet of paper to form words or sentences. This simple, yet fun activity engages their attention, and it can lead to the development of many skills that will help them while learning English. 

In addition to fostering creativity, using student-generated materials within the classroom can give your students a greater sense of autonomy, which can strengthen their motivation to learn things on their own or to further explore topics that you introduce to them. These types of activities in ESL learning can also teach them how to brainstorm, plan, and execute decisions, which builds their critical thinking skills as they relate to the English language. 

Application to Your Lessons 

As you gain more experience with teaching young learners, you’ll master these five strategies and will find more and more ways to enhance every lesson by adapting them to different topics. Just remember to always be considerate of the fact that children don’t operate on the same cognitive level as adults, and by keeping this in mind, you can prepare your lessons more effectively, and in a way that your students will find more engaging.