Teaching young language learners requires special considerations due to their unique characteristics. Young learners are defined as children between ages 5-12 years old. They have short attention spans but are curious, energetic, and imaginative. Effective teaching strategies for young learners include keeping lessons interesting and lively, incorporating sensory activities, and focusing on meaningful language use. It is also important to consider each student's intellectual development level and individual needs, as young learners learn best through concrete experiences. Different types of students, such as distracted, lazy, or overactive students require tailored teaching approaches. The key is to engage students and get them excited about learning English.

1. THE YOUNG LEARNER
Subject: Methodology Teaching Child
Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas ESPE

2. Young Language Learner
YLLs is a term that is used to refer to children from their first year of formal
schooling (usually somewhere between 5-7 years old) to when they are 11-12
years old, or to when they move on from primary to secondary school.” (Read,
2011)
Teaching YLLs can be very rewarding, but at the same time extremely
challenging. This group is characterized for being hugely energetic, curious and
imaginative, easily distracted and so into technology

3. Young learners is a catch-all term for students who are
not yet adults. The term swept into fashion at the
beginning of the nineties reflecting the trend to lower the
starting age and broaden the access to English language
learning to younger people in many countries all over the
world.
As a quick google search will show, the term ‘young
learners’ is frequently interpreted in different ways.
(Carol Read's ABC of Teaching Children, 2011)

4. Teaching children
• Teaching is the process of attending to people’s
needs, experiences and feelings, and intervening so
that they learn particular things, and go beyond the
given. (infed.org: education, community-building and
change, s.f.)
• Teaching children requires to pay attention not just to
the cognitive component but also the affective effort
they make in order to internalize their native and
second language.

5. It is important to consider the five categories which are proposed by
Brown (2001: 87-90) in rendering some practical approaches to teaching
young learners. Those are as follows
Attention Span
Considering that children have short attention spans, it is quite
useful to make lessons become interesting, lively, and fun
Intellectual Development
b. It is closely related to what Piaget calls ‘concrete opinion”,
i.e., young learners understand something concrete
Sensory Input
f. In consideration of sensory input, activities
should
strive to go well beyond the visual and auditory
modes that learners feel are usually sufficient for
a
classroom
Affective Factors
Children are often innovative.
They are extremely sensitive
Authentic, meaningful language
Language Children are focused on what
the new language can actually be used for here and now.

6. Types of students
• Your students are very different, and they work at their own pace. You’re trying to get
insight to each of them.Just learn more about each type of student in your class.
The lazy / poorly motivated student
This type of student rarely completes his/her work and when he/she does it, it
is low quality.
Some strategies suggested:
Check the student’s special needs. Test the student in case he or she hasn’t been tested yet.
The troublemaker
Common behavior of this student are that he is usually late or absent, disrupts the class, gets other
students to involve in poor behavior
Some strategies good to be consider are:
Try to find information about their special needs to help them. See what has already been done.

7. The distracted student
• They struggle focusing on activities given. Normally,
distracted students start working well and start to lose
focus after a little while. They tend to chat with friends,
move around the room, or stare somewhere outside the
classroom.
• Some of the strategies to be used here:
• Check if they have special needs
Natural Leader
• Natural Leaders have an inborn capacity to stand out like a
sore thumb. They always have good ideas and know how
to attract people
Overactive
• He always has a question to ask and comment to make. He
joined a book, science, math, chess, debate, or glee club.

8. Start teaching and get kids excited
about learning English