characteristic of young learners

Young Learners

As a teacher, before we teach young learners, we should know what the characteristics of young learners itself, because teaching young learners is different with teaching adult learners.

There are the characteristic of young learners mentioned by Clark (1990: 6-8):

a.    Children are developing conceptually: they develop their way of thinking from the concrete to the abstract thing.

b.  Children have no real linguistics, different from the adult learners that already have certain purpose in learning language, for instances, to have a better job, children rarely have such needs in learning a foreign language. They learn subject what school provide for them.

c.    Children are still developing; they are developing common skill such as turn talking and the use of body language.

d.    Young children very egocentric, they tend to resolve around themselves.       

e.    Children get bored easily. Children have no choice to attend school. The lack of the choice means that class activities need to be fun interesting and exciting as possible by setting up the interesting activities. 

if we already  known the characteristics of young learners, it can make us easier to design the techniques that we will use for teaching in the class. The learners also can learn something that they need. so, I think it's very important for us as a student in teacher training and education to know about it.