MSc in software Enginerring, MA in English- TESOL, BSc in CSE

1. Teaching Across Age Levels
Chapter 6
Directed By
Dr. Sukanto Roy(SRO)
(Assistant Professor)
North South University
Written By
Md. Shamim Hossain Biswas
Student-id: 2016003055
Course code: Eng. 574
Department of English

2. What do you mean by teaching across age levels?
Teaching language by addressing the learner variable of age.
1. Teaching Children ≤11, Primary school-aged students
2. Teaching Teens >11 && <18, High school-aged students
3. Teaching Adults ≥ 18, College || University students

3. Teaching Children
The following approaches may be considered to teach children:
1. Intellectual development
2. Attention Span
3. Sensory input
4. Affective factors
5. Authentic and meaningful language

4. The children up to the age 11 are considered as intellectual development
stage. This means the growth of a child’s ability to think, find out reason and
solve problem. This is the time to organize their minds, ideas and thoughts to
make a sense of the living world. They sometimes face difficulty to deductive
reasoning.
The following statements can be considered to teach under this
stage:
1. Do not explain grammar using difficult terms like “Present Progressive”
or “Relative Clause”.
2. Avoid abstract term.
1. Intellectual development || Cognitive || Imaginative

5. 2. Attention Span
Children have short attention span for understanding boring, useless and difficult
text. Children feel interest to learn a language when they can use it here and there.
To make classes interesting and enjoyable, What teachers need to do?
• Design activities that capture the student's immediate attention
• Provide variety activities
• Teachers need make animated, lively and enthusiastic lessons
• To keep children laughing and learning in order to remove sense of humor.
• Tap into the students’ sense of curiosity to maintain attention and focus.

6. 3. Sensory input
Children have five sensory inputs to acquire language : Hearing , Seeing ,Smelling
,Tasting ,Touching.
To stimulate those sensory inputs, the following initiatives can be
considered.
 Teachers should strive the visual and auditory modes in their activities.
 To prepare lessons with physical activities, such as role paly, play game etc.
 Group wise project distribution or other hands-on activities
 To use nonverbal language
 To encourage children in sensory activities, such as smell flower,
 To give audiovisual activities such as watching video.

7. 4. Affective factors
Children are very sensitive to express something. There are many affective factors
that hindrance the children to learn language effectively, such as, they may think
what others think about me? If I cannot speak well then what others will say? They
suffer from so many inferiority complex.
To overcome this potential barrier, a teacher may take following
initiatives.
 To help students to laugh each other even after making so many mistake.
 Teacher must have patience and supportive mind to build students self-esteem.
 To elicit as much oral presentation as possible from student

8. 5. Authentic and meaningful language
It is mandatory to make each class authentic and meaningful for children as they
always want immediate rewards. If language is not useful enough, they may reject it
instead of welcoming.
The following activities can be considered to make influence them:
 To provide context-embedded learning, such as storyline, familiar situation.
 To use real life convention and show meaningful purposes.
 To show an interrelationship among listening, speaking, reading and writing. It
means a whole language is essential for them.

9. Teaching Teens
The teaching teens is risky task because they are an age of transition, confusion,
self-consciousness, growth and changing the bodies and mind. The factors
surrounding ego ,self-image and self-esteem are at their pinnacle. Teens are
ultrasensitive to how others perceive their changing physical and emotional selves
along with their mental capacity.
The following factors can be considered to keep their self-esteem high:
 To avoid embarrassments at all costs.
 Affirming each students’ talent and strength.
• To allow mistakes or other errors.
• Demotivating competitions between classmates
• Encouraging small group work.

10. Teaching Adults
Adults are intellectually grown-ups with mature cognitions. a special consideration
has to be taken to teach adults.
The following precautions should be considered for teaching adult:
 Show respect for their deeper thoughts and feelings.
 Don't treat adults like children.
 Don't discipline adult as like as children
• Don't underestimate emotional factors of adult

11. Thank you all for hearing me with patience