At the end of the day, isn’t this why most people learn a second language? When you can speak to people in their own language you deepen connections and understanding. Learn a foreign language as a child and you have a lifetime to benefit from cross-cultural friendships, broader career opportunities, exciting travel adventures and deeper insights into how others see the world.

Studies have shown that people who are bilingual are better at tasks that require multi-tasking and attention focusing than monolinguals. Brain scans show they have more gray matter in the regions of their brain that are involved in executive function. The hypothesis is that the effort to constantly choose the right language at the right time provides a “mental gymnastics” for bilinguals which gives them extra practice in focusing their attention.

Studies of tens of thousands of high school students have found that students who have studied foreign languages perform better on the American College Test (ACT) for English and Mathematics. Additional studies have found that SAT-verbal scores improve with the length of time students have studied the foreign language. So if you want your child to ace those tests, encourage her to learn a foreign language.

Years ago people believed that learning a second language would confuse a child. Now, research shows that children who study a foreign language perform better in their native language than non-bilingual students, as measured on standardized tests. Other research has shown that children learning a second language start reading earlier, and the advantage increases the earlier they are exposed to the second language. In addition, bilingual children were better at identifying grammatically incorrect sentences than monolinguals. As Goethe said, “Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.”

Dr. Katherine Kinzler, at Cornell University, tested monolingual and bilingual children on a task which required them to consider someone else’s perspective to understand her meaning. Children in bilingual environments performed better than monolingual children. As Dr. Kinzler explains, “children in multilingual environments have social experiences that provide routine practice in considering the perspectives of others: they have to think about who speaks which language to whom, who understands which content, and the times and places in which different languages are spoken.”

Some studies have shown that people who regularly speak a second language may be able to delay Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia by 4.5 years. The hypothesis is that by improving the executive function of the brain, bilinguals develop a “cognitive reserve” which helps delay symptoms of dementia.

Studies have shown that speakers of tonal languages, like Mandarin and Cantonese, were better at identifying musical pitches than speakers of non-tonal languages like English and French.

In tonal languages a word can have different meanings depending on the pitch and inflection of the voice. What happens if you don’t pay attention to the tone in Chinese? Say “ma” with a high level tone, and you’ve said "mother". Say it with a falling then rising tone, and you’ve said "horse". Best not to get the two words mixed up.

Children learn though making sense of the world.

·        According to Vygotsky

Adults mediate the world for children though playing, stories, questions, ideas, experiences.

 

Piaget in the English class

·        Children learn from actively interacting with the physical environment in developmental stages.

·        They learn through their own individual actions and exploration

·        The children gradually develop their formal, logical thinking,

·        Children are encouraged to solve problems.

·        Knowledge derives from action.

Vygotsky in the English class

·        Teacher models questions for children

·        "Do you like swimming?" and encourages similar questions

·        Through doing things in a social context, the children internalize language

Bruner's scaffolding and routines

·        Teachers have to get children interested in the tasks

·        Teachers have to simplify difficult tasks breaking them into smaller steps.

·        Teachers have to keep the children on track always reminding of the goal set.

·        Teachers have to assist the children's effort demonstrating other ways of doing the task

·        Teachers have to show the idealized version of the

·        task.

Establishing routines is the number one tool in the YL teacher’s tool kit. Establishing routines and sticking to them can help with almost every area in the classroom, most importantly classroom management. Many of the students in YL classrooms aren’t at the level where they can understand everything that happens or why, and they definitely don’t understand everything the teacher says. Having routines established early on gives the students a concrete framework in which to work and behave. They can understand and rely on routines to make them feel safe in what may be an unfamiliar situation. Routines help students become aware of teacher expectations and they also provide them with a way of following the lesson without having to understand the concept of time. Three routines I use are:

Start of the lesson: the students put anything that can cause a distraction (coats, bags, phones, etc.) on pegs or at the back of the classroom and their books and pens stay under their chairs out of sight but close by. Keeping everything out of their hands keeps them focused on the teacher and the lesson.

Giving instructions: the students sit back on their chairs and put their hands on their head. Getting the students to go back to a “neutral” space away from the excitement of an activity allows the teacher to ensure that all the students are paying attention. Asking them to put their hands on their heads stops them from distracting each other and touching any materials that may be out.

End of the lesson: the students collect their bags and coats and sit back on their chairs. Ensure that the classroom is tidy and the students are calm before letting them leave.

Children who are able to make their own decisions become more invested in the result of that decision and are more likely to follow through with a task due to their emotional and personal investment in it. This mentality can also be applied in the YL classroom. Giving students options and allowing them to make decisions which affect their learning leads to the students becoming more engaged in the lesson and in the activity.

Naming activities can also be useful. When it comes to the drilling and repetition sections of the lesson, for example, the students can decide which activity they want to play, e.g. the ‘ball game,’ the ‘fly swat’ game or ‘flashcard circle.’ This gives them the impression that even though it is the teacher who decides what they learn, it is the students as a unit who decide how.

 

This might sound obvious but repeat, repeat, repeat. Practise makes perfect and repeating structures and language is incredibly important for language retention. New teachers may think that YLs become very bored very quickly and it’s true. Children do have a short attention span and often don’t like sitting in one place or concentrating on one thing for too long.

There are ways of getting the students to repeat language without losing them to a life of boredom. For example, keeping the target language or target structures the same but changing the drilling activity will make the students think that they are doing something completely different. Even small changes such as position in the classroom, from sitting to standing or changing partners, can revitalise their enthusiasm in an activity. Other ways, such as changing interaction patterns to pair work, small group or mingle activities, can also create a new dynamic.

Being fair means being consistent. Consistency is a word which always comes up when teaching YLs and teaching in general and being consistent can mean different things. Consistency, as far as behaviour management is concerned, means treating each student the same and applying the same rules to every student. However, it also means being a trusted judge.

Running/shouting dictation: These activities are basically the same but with a small difference. Vocabulary or sentences are displayed around the room and students are in pairs or groups. One student writes while the other either shouts the phrase across the room (shouting dictation) or runs backwards and forwards between the sentences and their partner (running dictation).

Teacher-student swap: Students love taking on the role of the teacher and love feeling in control. Asking students to set up activities (once the rules of the activities have already been properly established) gives them a sense of control and allows them to use more English. Asking students to give instructions, e.g. touch the card / run to (vocabulary), is another way of releasing control.

You have a beginner class of 8-to-10 year olds who are learning farm animals. You’ve sat them in a circle and you’ve drilled from flashcards; you’ve said a word and they’ve touched the correct card. You’ve noticed that the students are getting restless and are starting to mess around but you still haven’t finished drilling all the vocabulary. What should you do? First of all, there’s no point labouring an activity. The students clearly need a change of pace so give them one: keeping pace up within a classroom is very important to keep distractions and behavioural problems to a minimum.

Lewis (1992) holds the idea that vocabulary acquisition is the main task of second language acquisition and the language skills as listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating all can not go without vocabulary.

There are several ways to show the meanings of an English word, through such aids as: 1) objects that can easily be brought to class(umbrellas, scissors, tools, buttons of many colors and sizes, etc); 2) drawings by the teacher and drawings by the students; 3) demonstrations to show actions(Allen, 1983:41).

There are varieties of activities in a classroom to help students learn target language effectively, such as games, music, dramatic stories, amusing anecdotes etc. Role-play is one of them. Role-play helps students learn effectively and use target language as freely and communicatively as they can. Role-play aims at fostering the ability of students and is characterized as mutual teaching and learning. It can realize the teaching model of “students play a principle role and the teacher plays a leading role” (Littlewood, 1981:56).

According to De Neve and Heppner (1997), the main steps of designing role-play are summarized as follows:

· Firstly, teachers should choose a situation for a role play, keeping in mind students’ needs and interests. Teachers should select role-plays that will give the students an opportunity to practice what they have learned.

· The next step is to come up with ideas on how this situation may develop. Students’ level of language proficiency should be taken into consideration.

· After finishing selecting a suitable role play, teachers should predict the language needed for it. It is recommended to introduce any new vocabulary before the role play.

· This step implies providing students with concrete information and clear role descriptions so that they could play their roles with confidence. Teachers should describe each role in a manner that will let the students identify with the characters.

· Teachers ask for some volunteers to act out role-play in front of the class in this step. It is recommended that teachers avoid intervening in a role play with error corrections not to discourage the students.

· Once the role play is finished, teachers should give feedback to students. This means pointing out students’ advantages and disadvantages.

Here is the one sample of role-play on using in EFL classes according to my experience: the teacher designs a communicative activity for the pupils in order to learn two adjectives—impulsive, bad-tempered, to consolidate what they have learned, pair-work, and develop their communicative abilities. She offers the pupils appropriate explanations of these two words, which are used to describe people’s personality. Before assigning the task, she tells the pupils the instructions that the situation is to predict the partner’s fate: one acts as a fortune teller, the other a customer; the pupils choose their own partners freely; the fortune teller predicts future events for the customer; some words in the role-play should concern the words what they have learned in the lesson. Then most pupils participate in the role-play actively. After they have finished performing the role-play, many pairs volunteer to demonstrate their performance before the whole class. The teacher access their advantages and disadvantages roughly. After the role-play, the pupils’ anxiety and tension are relieved greatly from their facial expressions and behaviors. The teacher and the pupils are familiar with each other now. Nevertheless, classroom discipline will be a bit mess. Sometimes a few boys even chat with their desk mates. It takes twenty minutes.

Additionally, through the observation of the English lesson in EFL classes, we can think that role-play makes great demands upon the professional skills and competence of teachers. While using role-play activity teachers need to have other abilities as well as the proficiency of target language, such as organizing ability, insight into learners. Therefore, it is recommended that foreign language teachers should enhance their standard in order to improve the effects in practical teaching.

 

When designing materials, teachers need to consider a number of factors. By taking time to consider educational goals—and ways to create and deliver materials appropriate to the specific body of students being taught—teachers will be more successful in creating quality teaching material that promotes learning.

Take into consideration individual needs and learning styles: Choose materials that present information in a variety of ways. Using mixed media (text, video, images, real world examples, graphs, etc.) make information more interesting and address learners' different learning styles.

2.     Materials should expose the learners to language in authentic use (Tomlinson, 2011)

3.     Materials should be culturally relevance

4.     Materials should stretch/challenge the learners

"throughout this process we have obtained valuable feedback"

2. Helpful information or criticism that is given to someone to say what can be done to improve a performance, product, etc.