III. THE YOUNG LEARNER

  

Kindergarten children are in a sensitive period for language development. They absorb languages effortlessly and they are good imitators of speech sounds. Because they are very self centered, they do not work well in groups, and they respond best to activities and learning situations relating to their own interests and experiences. Although they have a short attention span, they have great patience for repetition of the same activity or game.

To be a young language learner it’s a very complicated role for a student because of the new language that they are acquiring. It is more difficult to them because they are still developing in their mother tongue; based on that we had to develop certain teaching strategies according to their level, age and personalities.

In our teaching practicum, we had different types of students because children are different from each other.

Hyperactive students

They always wanted to be stand up doing different things. Although hyperactive children can be difficult to teach, some strategies that helped us to deal with this situation were: providing structured classroom activities, personal attention, as well as positive expectations and warmth, were good strategies to follow for hyperactive children, as well as for all students.

The ones who do not like to participate

In our classes we had some students that were very reserved; they seemed that they did not like to participate in classes; we can say that they were shy but we always tried to make them participate, giving them confidence and encourage them to participate, telling them that participate is good way to learn.

The ones that likes to participle

They liked to participate in all the activities because they wanted to learn. They always were raising their hand to answer the question that we did. The most important was that they always paid attention to the class. We consider that student’s participation is important to check their individual learning.

Talkative students

Talkative students liked to ask question about everything even though, those question were not related to English. They loved to share things that they did or to tell things that happened to them or just to tell about their families but also they liked to ask us for words that they wanted to know how to say it in English; we think that that is good because we could see that they were interested in learning.

All our little students were very respectful, intelligent, ingenious, educated, polite and sociable. We can describe our groups of students as very good ones because all of them paid attention in class also they performed well all the activities. They had a good rapport with us, with their classmates and with their others teachers.

Something good that we have to mention about our students is that they always sang the good morning song to begin the class and the good bye song to end the class. Every time that they wanted to go to the bath room they always asked for permission also if they wanted something they asked for permission, we can say that those were good quality of them.

The most important characteristics about our students was that they always were excited of learning English because they really liked English

Teaching to very young learners definitely is an unforgettable experience to us because we learned a lot from all our little students.