Teaching Children

Are you interested to become an English teacher? What teacher do you want to be? and Do you prefer to teach children, teenagers or adults?

Well, some prefer teaching children as they like children so much and some thinks that teaching adults would be easier because they are mature enough to make their own decision.

Here are the criteria to be considered when teaching English across age level.

• Intellectual development
• Attention span
• Sensory input
• Affective factors
• Authentic meaningful language.

And now lets look at how to teach children ( age up to 11 )

image from google.

Intellectual development:

image from google

• avoid rules and complex grammar
• give examples and demonstrate certain pattern                                 
• repetition is needed
• do's and donts'

Attention span

• short only for things that are boring, useless or too difficult.
• teachers have to make the lesson interesting, lively and fun by doing variety of activities 
• sense humour will help to keep them intested.

Sensory input

• do a lot of physical activity, role play and total physical response using all the five senses- sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing
• hands on activities help children to internalize language.
• use sensory aids- audiovisual like videos, tapes and music.

image from google

image from google

Affective factors

• non verbal language is very important
• show patience and be supportive                               
• sense of humour is useful

Authentic meaningful language

• focus on language use of here and now
• language should be context embedded
• use the whole language approach.

"It takes a very special person to be able to  teach children effectively" - Teaching by Principles, H. Douglas Brown.

future educator,

shikin hasnan.