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.

Some Tools to Assess EFL Young Learners

Mohammed S. Alkhamali

2013

Twitter: @Alkhamali_M

As an EFL teacher for young learners, you need to use different assessment tools to make sure that these tools provide reliable and valid results. Using different tools helps you to distinguish the individual differences among your students and treat them accordingly. Variation in assessment tools helps also learners in, for instance, self-reflection, critical thinking, learning… Here are some assessment tools that, in my opinion, should be used in assessing EFL young learner.

Peer assessment: it helps in increasing the learners' in-class interaction. One of the young learners' characteristics is that they are competitive, this can be seen when a learner commits a mistake others are eager to correct him. This kind of assessment provides an extra space to practice English in the class. It also develops the critical thinking of learners. Teacher can expand in using peer assessment by letting learners assess each other's homework or exam sheet. Although it is a good way of assessment, teacher needs to set some rules to avoid aggressiveness or subjectivity between learners. For example,  the teacher replaces students' names on exam paper with numbers.

Writing: Teacher can assess his students based on any kind of their writings. These writings might be in form of quizzes, mind maps, group work sheets… they reflect learners abilities in understanding the writing rules such as direction and spelling. I try as possible as I can to avoid mentioning "written tests" as they would inhabit the young learners from learning the new language.

Observation: the teacher can set an interaction context that allow him observes the learners' usage of the FL. For example, working in pairs or in groups, allow teacher observing an authentic use of the FL. This helps teacher to distinguish the difficulties that his learners face in pronunciation, listening comprehension… etc.

As young learners get more older, the teacher can use different kinds of assessment tools such as:

Self-reflection: this type of assessment helps learners to build higher cognitive skills as the learner will critically think about his performance and work to improve it. The teacher can set some criteria to facilitate self-reflection at beginning. For instance, the teacher wants his learners to reflect on their writing paragraph, he then sets numbers of criteria such as starting with indentation, writing the topic sentence… etc. This will help students to realize the way of self-reflection.

Portfolio:  Let your students collect their works; work sheets, writings, photos… etc. and from time to time let them compare the development in their performance. This motivate learners to do their best. It also fulfill their competitive tendency. The learners can use the portfolio as an archive of their works to use it again and again.

 
You can see that in the most aforementioned assessment tools, learners play an essential role. That because I am heading to deliver the message that assessments can be used as a learning tool. you can judge your learners' performance through these tools without putting learners under stress of taking exams. These tools also supports self-learning, learners' autonomy.

Stages of Learning EFL for Youngster

Mohammed S. Alkhamali
2013
Twitter: @Alkhamali_M

Young learners of a foreign language pass by different stages in their way of mastering the language. Although there are different views about these stages, they have something in common. i.e. the differentiation of the number of the stages does not change the fact that the represented ideas are the same. The period of each stage is determined by the level of the provided language and by the learners' age. In the following, I will discuss some of the views about such stages that are related to our context in terms of learners' age and level of the language.

Piaget divided the stages into two stages. The first one is called assimilation. It describes the state when the action happens without any change in the learner's behavior. An example from our context, as EFL, the use of an adjective to describe a noun, the learner may use the same structure of his mother tongue that is N+adj. The second stage is called accommodation. Where the learner in the same previous context learnt the use of such function and use it in an appropriate way. (Cameron, L. 2001. P3)

In contrast with Piaget view, Vygotsky considers learning as a social interaction. He divided stages into two. The first where the learner of a foreign language produces the language with a help of others, usually teachers, this stage is called interpersonal. The other stage is called intrapersonal where the learner becomes more independent and beings able to produce the language by himself. (Grow, G. n d)

Tabors and Snow (as cited in Phillip C. n d) identify four stages of acquiring a second language as follows:

1-     Home language use, where the learner shows resistance for the new language by using his first language.

2-     Nonverbal period. In this stage the learner realizes that his first language is not appropriate to this context. He becomes silent and communicate using nonverbal means.

3-     Telegraphic and formulaic stage. In this stage the learner starts using the new language but in ungrammatical / incomplete form.

4-     Productive language. In this stage learner starts to speak language relatively well with producing new phrases as he learnt more vocabulary.

Krashen and Terrell ( as cited in http://www.ascd.org) divided the second language acquisition stages into five however, the stages start from age of 0 month. We can adapt these stages to our context by starting the first stage in the fourth primary grade as follows:

1-     Preproduction. In this stage the learner has no or minimal understanding of the new language. He also nods by yes / no as a response. Instead of writing and speaking, he draws and points.

2-     Early production. Here the learner starts responding using one or two words. He has a limited understanding to the new language. He also uses the present form of verbs.

3-     Speech emergence. In this stage the learner shows a good understanding and can produce simple sentences however, he still makes errors in grammar and pronunciation.

4-     Intermediate fluency. The understanding of the second/foreign language increases and the produced errors decreases.

5-     Advanced fluency. When the learner masters the language and become a native-like speaker.

The aforementioned views describe the same stages in a way or another. In the following I will try to gather these views in three stages, with taking into account the context of our situation where English is the foreign language and the target group are the learners from the fourth primary grade to the third intermediate grade. Different variables should also be taken into consideration such as  motivation towards learning a new language,  ability of pronouncing sounds, their age …, as internal factors; curriculum level, teacher, the linguistic background of the parents… , as external factors.

The first stage is the pre-production. This stage shows a demonstration of the first language use. Learners still use the first language due to the difficulty in producing the new sounds and words, shyness of committing mistakes or the stereotype about the foreign language in the society. Teachers in this stage have to encourage learners by explaining ,in Arabic, the benefits of learning English. Teachers also should be aware to the importance of positive reinforcement as a way of increasing learners' motivation. Exposing learners to the English is the best way to make them familiar with the new language and its sound system. The learning in this stage focuses on sounds and simple vocabulary. This stage, in my opinion, will not last for a long time as learners in this age are eager to learn, less shy of committing errors and also competitive.

The early production stage is the second one. In this stage, learners start to use their previous acquired knowledge in learning the new ones. Arabic still affect learning and producing English. This can be seen in form of translating ideas from Arabic to English. As the level of the language increases in terms of the difficulty and the covered aspects and areas as well. This might inhabit some learners from mastering these aspects especially grammar. As English being considered as a foreign language in our context, lots of in-class practice is needed to fulfill the communication need. Teachers in this stage should be more tolerant with learners' mistakes to keep them on track of willingness to learn the language. This tolerance can be seen as teachers emphasis on fluency rather than accuracy.  This stage will last for a long period of time.

The third stage is the fluent production. Reaching this stage in this short time with such little exposing can be so difficult. We need well qualified teachers, in terms of language and teaching, to teach the learners during the whole grades. Also we need well planned and designed curriculum that is taking learners needs and interests into account. We also need authentic communicative situations that ensure language use outside the class.

To sum up, stages of mastering English for young learners are differ is terms of number and length depending on different factors. However, these stages follow the same processes in a way or another. Learners start with fully use of their native language instead of the target one. They then move to use the new language with help of their teachers or parents. After that, they become fully independent in producing the new language.

 References

http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/106009/chapters/The-Stages-of-Second-Language-Acquisition.aspx

Cameron, L. 2001. Teaching Languages to Young Learners. Cambridge university press.

Grow, G. n d. Writing and Multiple Intelligences. Can be found on http://www.longleaf.net/ggrow/7In/Personal.html#sthash.6n7NaVzd.dpuf

Phillip C. n d. BECOMING BILINGUAL:FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. Can be found on http://216.31.235.229/public/Education%20Binder%202012-2013/01%20Education/Dual%20langauge%20Learners/BECOMING%20BILINGUAL%20article.pdf