2.2 Methods supporting teaching and learning

“My hope for young children is that they learn that they can learn—that important people in their lives support them through the process of learning: trying new things, sometimes succeeding right away, other times struggling, feeling disappointed, receiving encouragement, learning from that whole experience, then trying again.”[1]

The main goals of teaching English to young learners should be the followings:

• to encourage the sense of wonder and joy
• to offer play-based activities
• to apply exercises that reflect children’s interest, family and culture
• to stop, to reflect on, to think back what we do and why we do it that way

Approaches to learning

Active learning

Strategies of active learning

• Individual work
• Paired activities
• Small group activities
• Cooperative work

Task 1 Give a tick against the issues you agree with

Keys to Success

• Be creative! Invent new strategies and adapt existing ones to your needs.
• Start small and be brief.
• Develop a plan for an active learning activity, try it out, collect feedback, then modify and try it again.
• Start active learning from the first day.
• Tell children why you are doing this.
• Request children vary their seating arrangements to increase their chances to work with different partners.
• Negotiate a signal for students to stop talking.
• Randomly call on pairs to share.
• Find a colleague or two to plan with (and perhaps teach with) while you're implementing active learning activities.

Task 2 Have you experienced the followings? If yes, think what and how you should change in your teaching.

 Concept learning[2]

Teaching simple concepts with clear examples labelled as members or non-members of the     concept.

Activity types

Task based learning TBL

Task 3 Do you agree with the following ideas? Could you add few more characteristic features of this method to the followings?

The central focus of the lesson is the task itself, not a grammar point or a lexical area, and the aim is not to ‘learn the structure’ but to ‘complete the task’. The language therefore becomes an instrument of communication, whose purpose is to help complete the task successfully.

The stages of TBL can be:

1. Pre-task:  the teacher familiarizes the learners with situations/vocabulary and sets up the activities. It brings up language that may be useful for the children.
2. Learners do the tasks in groups and pairs. Here mistakes are not important, the teacher supports and monitors. Communication is the focus.
3. This stage is for checking and correcting mistakes and resolving doubts and problems.

Team-based learning

Team based learning can transform traditional content with application and problem solving skills, while developing interpersonal skills.[3]

According to Michaelsen[4], "most of the reported "problems" with learning groups (free-riders, member conflict, etc.) are the direct result of inappropriate group assignments". Michaelsen adds that "assignments that require groups to make decisions and enable them to report their decisions in a simple form, will usually generate high levels of group interaction."

Collaborative learning

According to the social conception, learning is a collaborative process. Collaborative learning leverages the differences between participants in their knowledge, skills, and resources and creates the circumstance for participants to help each other.[5]

Project based learning PBL

Task 4 List what you know about this method. If you have not experienced it read the followings.

Whereas TBL[6] makes a task the central focus of a lesson, PBL often makes a task the focus of a whole term.

1. A central topic from which all the activities derive and which drives the project towards a final objective.

2. Access to means of investigation (the Internet has made this part of project work much easier) to collect, analyse and use information.

3. Plenty of opportunities for sharing ideas, collaborating and communicating. Interaction with other learners is fundamental to PBL.

4. A final product (often produced using new technologies available to us) in the form of posters, drawings, pictures.

Task 5 Explain what you have already tried out with the children