CHARACTERISTICS OF YOUNG LEARNERS

When we are a teacher, we should know the characteristic of children, or the characteristic of young learner that we taught. Young learners mean children from the first year of formal schooling (5 or 6 year old) to eleven or twelve year age. Young learners have own special characteristics that differentiate them from adult learners. There should be known and understood by the teacher to give contribution to improve their quality of teaching and learning process.

Characteristics divided into four group they are; physical side, psychology side, social side and the other characteristics. Here Halliwel (1992: 3-5) clarifies the characteristics of children by the psychological such as the children are already very good in interpreting meaning without necessarily understanding the individual word means that they are easily to interpret the meaning without asking the meaning to someone (teacher) who talk with them, but the teacher have to give the signal by mimic or gesture to them to make clearly. So without more explanation they will understand what is the meaning by gesture and mimic.

The second is Children already have great skill in using limited language creativity, it’s mean that when the children have limited vocabulary they will more creative in using language, they are understand what the speaker mean but they are little difficult to answer, so the children use their limited vocabulary by their modified and make it new sentences. For example when they want to say “hate” but they don’t know that vocabulary so they change with “no like”, it was normally and they don’t think about grammatical. As a teacher should be understood and don’t blame them because of their grammar are not good, it was not big problem if their speaking doesn’t followed the grammar, the important thing is the speaker and the listener are understand what they talk about.

The third is children have a ready imagination, children world are full of imagination and fantasy, and it is more than simply matter of enjoyment means that children feel like they have their own world, when they saw something that interest them in the unreal world they will imagine it for example when they are watching superhero in the television or movie studio their imagine work, how about if they are become superhero like what they watch, they can fly everywhere, they can change their self become robot and fight with monster to save the city or the others, so in their feeling, they want to help everyone who need, because they are superhero. As a teacher it’s better if we support them and give them facility what they need, for example we can give them story books, toys such as robots, dolls or others, that can stimulus their creativity.

In conclusion the teachers who teach young learner have to know the characteristics of children to make them easy to teach and make the students easy to understand the materials with fun and enjoy.

 Reference: www.Cemink's Voices.com