Characteristics of EFL Activities for Young Learners

 

Mohammed S. Alkhamali

2013

Twitter: @Alkhamali_M 

 

 

      Learners of an EFL respond actively to activities that touch upon their needs and interests. This active respond ensures good quality of outcomes as learners are fully engaged in such activities. The teacher has to pay attention to his designing or selecting of activities to make sure that it will work as planned with the target group of learners. Some characteristics of good EFL activities are:

1-    Interactivity: the activities should involve interaction with other peers. This will ensure practicing language in a communicative situation. It will help in sharing and exchanging ideas and opinions. Interactivity ensures the integration of skills as the participants communicate. It also prepares students for team works. In pairs and group work help students to discover his own ability for example, ability to write fast, speak in public…etc.

2-    Familiarity and variation: before assigning an activity make sure that your students are familiar with such type. Students effectively practice familiar activity. If you present new type of activity model it first then let learners practice it under your supervision. Familiarity does not contrasts with variation. You need to balance between familiarity and variation for instance, the first four chapters you teach vocabulary through pictures and grammar through filling-in activity, here you get the advantage of both characters aforementioned.

3-    Physical: psychomotor domain would be the only neglected one in our most activities. We usually concentrate on the cognitive and sometime on the affective ones. The young learners are eager to practice physical activities that are set for linguistic purposes for example, in teaching "imperative" you will see your students willing to practice physical response activities.

4-    Using technology: most of young learners now a days are wizard in using computer program. You can take the advantage of that by providing activities through the use of computer. You can design your own or adapt them. Adding multimedia to the activity makes it more attractive and interesting for the students.

5-    Difficulty: it should be taken into consideration that difficult activities will inhabit learners from learning. On the other hand, easy ones will make the learners feel boring. Again, as mentioned with familiarity and variation, balance is needed to keep the stream of learning through activities flows.

To conclude, making activities interesting for the students is the key to fully engage them and to get the full advantage of the activities. This can happen by touching upon the three domains; cognitive, affective and psychomotor. Such comprehensive can be shown in terms of characteristics of the assign activities.