TEACHING ENGLISH FOR YOUNG LEARNER

FINAL ASSIGNMENT

DINDA FARAHDILLA SUNAS

A1B216024

ENGLISH STUDY PROGRAM

LANGUAGE AND ARTS DEPARTMENT

THE FACULTY OF TEACHER TRAINING AND EDUCATION

JAMBI UNIVERSITY

2019
 TEACHING READING TO YOUNG LEARNER IN A COURSE

Some students are in a situation where they can learn and get the improvement to take up
a new language more quickly and easily than others. This fact is mostly known by the teacher
who teaches the second language in a school who oversees the young learners’ development in
every meeting. Clearly, some language learners are successful based on their willpower,
persistence, and the willingness mastering new language. However, there are other significance
factors that can affect the success beyond the control of the learner. These factors can be
categorized as internal and external.
Both internal and external factors are important for the young learners’ second language
acquisition. Internal factor comes within the young learner and they have brought those factors to
the particular learning situation, such as age, personality, motivation (intrinsic), experiences,
cognition and native language while the external factors are the factors that has been determined
in the particular language learning situation, such as curriculum, instruction, culture and status,
motivation (extrinsic), and access to native speakers. (“The Factors that Influence The
Acquisition of A Second Language,” n.d.). Here, in this paper, it is divided to the learner
demographics and characteristic as internal factor and the remaining gives more focus to the
external factors such as learning styles and teaching technique, learning environment and the
teacher’s views.
The purpose of this paper is to tell the reader about the real situation behind the teaching
and learning activity for young learners by paying attention to the aspects, both from the young
learners and beyond the learners. The overall paper will focus on the English teacher’s response
through an interview. This paper will use Teaching Languages to Young Learners (Lynne
Cameron, 2001) and Practical English Language Teaching: Young Learners (Caroline T. Linse,
2005) as sources to do this paper.
The interviewee of this paper is an English teacher of an English course who teaches
young learner. This paper will contain the analysis of teacher’s response toward the topic type of
program, learning styles, learning environment and the teacher’s view and the correlation of each
category to the theories or material in the sources books. In the end of this paper, it will be
concluded by summarizing the overall analysis of the interview that related to the Teaching
English for Young Learner’s material. The responses of the English teacher toward the type of
program, the technique of teaching reading, the difficulty and the solution of teaching reading,
the technique to determine texts, the supporting factor of teaching, the challenging aspect of
teaching reading, the strengths and the weaknesses of teaching reading.
For this paper, I have interviewed an English Teacher of Excellent Education Centre. I
will refer her as Miss L in this paper. She teaches young learners from 9 to 12 years old.
According to Imaniah & Nargis (2017), some researchers has different definition for the term
Young Learners, but they decide that the young learners focusing on children of pre-school and
primary school ages, such as children who start pre-school at about the age of three, the children
who start primary school at around the age of 5-7, and 11 or 12 years old as finish primary
school. In addition, according to Suyanto (2008), young learners are divided into Younger Group
(6-8 years old) and Older Group (9-12 Years old). To sum up from the theories before, she is
teaching the older group learners.
In the interview, she said that young learners of that age usually tend to be taught writing
and reading skill because they starts to on the higher level to learn something harder.
Furthermore, Suyanto (2008) adds that the students’ activities in learning include all of the
competencies such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing. However, miss L focuses on
writing and reading to teach the learners.
The teaching and learning process has been designed and structured as it should. Miss L
says that learning activity should be run as planned by the school. For teaching reading, there are
three meetings to teach each of text genres and at the end of the meeting, will be conducted a unit
test to measure the improvement of the students. For the first meeting, it will not be too long
because she usually does an introduction to explain the definition, the generic structure, and the
language feature used in a particular text. For the second meeting, miss L starts to give the
students exercises that consist of minimum five questions after the students read a text. In the last
meeting, she conducts a unit test to see the students’ comprehension toward reading. Thus, the
students will understand and remember that cycle.
Especially in reading, young learners will be introduced to the genres of text, answering
the following questions. To start learning process, Miss L usually does brainstorming about the
related text before reading activity started and then followed and answering the following
questions. According to Imaniah & Nargis (2017), it is important to determine the teaching
method to different ages, emphasize the language and address the cognitive skills. Furthermore,
Suyanto (2008) claims that there are some methods of teaching English for learners, one of them
method is brainstorming. Brainstorming is a strategy to maximize the students’ creativity in
problem solving (Osborn, 1953).
Applying some techniques in teaching reading can be helpful for the students. Miss L
tries to match the techniques she uses with the condition or situation of the students themselves.
Because of the different background knowledge that the students have, she will find the
technique that is suitable for the students. If the students only have a little knowledge of the text,
she will do discussion or work in pair, but if the students are capable enough to do it by
themselves, she will apply reading aloud technique. Applying some techniques to create literate
environment in the classroom is important because according to Anderson (1999) in Imaniah &
Nargis (2017:69), it is crucial to remember that activating background knowledge when needed
may be a key to comprehensible reading activity because background knowledge can help the
students to understand what they read and it also helping them to find the difficult word before
reading.
In reading activity, Miss L teaches the students a particular text. She considers that giving
them some examples will not make them confused because the students are not very young
learner. Besides, she also asks the students to rearrange a random generic structure of a text to a
good one. It supposed to make the students more understand and remember the structure of the
text by modifying it as a game.
Students will be more interested if the teaching and learning process is not monotonous.
The teacher needs to deliver the material with an interesting way but the students can get the
intended meaning and absorb the material well. That is why Miss L sometimes uses a game to
avoid boring situation. For reading itself, she usually makes some groups and each group should
accomplish the task given that related to the reading. Miss L also adds that she doesn’t use games
often in reading because she focuses in the text itself but using game can be helpful for the
students to get knowledge and more socialize with their friends. Sigurthardottir (2010) states that
games can be a very good way to practice skill social skill. By using games, the students can
practice because the games can easily be used to reenact various situations from real life and
provide students with practice in their fluency. In addition, Langran & Purcell (1994) also adds
that by using games, they can allow the students to do more on their own and it can increase their
confidence level. The teachers are giving their students a bigger role and they themselves will
step out of the frontline which is a positive way to give the students more responsibility.
In teaching reading for young learner, there are some difficulties that the students go
through. Miss L says that the most common difficulty is vocabulary. She says that her students
come from different background of knowledge and environment. The students in her class are
not in the same level because there are new and old students. The experiences that the old
students have make them more understand and used to with English vocabulary. Meanwhile, for
the new students, the teacher needs to give more and special approach to them. It is one of the
ways Miss L does in her class. For the second difficulty, because of the teacher focuses on
introducing genre of texts as I have stated before, sometimes the students still confused to
differentiate the texts. They often forget to remember because they need to give more attention
not only to the text but to the other material. They also not used to repeat their lesson so that it
makes them easier to forget. One of Miss L’s ways is to give important keywords for them. She
tells them the keywords: “amuse” for narrative text; “describing” for descriptive text, “how to”
for procedural text.
In determining the text for the students, miss L doesn’t have specific way because she has
been given a main book course to be delivered. She says that the context of the material has been
adjusted to the curriculum in which she taught. For the additional material, she will find it on
internet or from other books. It is important to see and analyze the book before giving it to the
students. The material should be suitable to the students’ level in order to avoid students having
difficulty to understand the content of the text. The contents are seen from the vocabulary, the
grammar, and the content itself. As cited by Rushton (2007), it is importance to know that the
different types of texts will make different demands on the reader and that these demand vary in
relation to the oral language development of the reader and also their background knowledge of
the subject matter of the text. The structures and grammatical features also affect the choices of
text.
The supporting factor to help the students motivated in learning reading can be in form of
anything. Miss L says that to motivate the students more in learning English, not only in reading,
she always tries to decorate and arrange the classroom so that the students will be easy to mingle
with other students. This statement also supported by a theory from Reutzel and Clark (2011).
They state that “The physical arrangement and organization of a classroom can be powerful and
supportive of effective literacy instruction”. This is one of the appropriate ways to attract the
students’ attention by creating a good environment as cited from The Access Center (2007) in
Imaniah & Nargis (2017), literate environments should motivate students and emphasize the
importance of speaking, reading, and writing.
Miss L says that there is no other supporting facility to help students’ achievement such
as the use of library, or the reading centre but the most important is to make the students
comfortable to study and socialize with other friends. According to Seker (2013) in Nepal
(2016), there are many factors that considered to influence the students’ attitudes toward school
such as behaviors, school rules, classroom environment, students’ family, the student
himself/herself, teaching process, exams taken and evaluation processes. Many researchers also
explain that good learning environments are important for students’ academic achievement such
as school with better building condition.
Besides the environment and arrangement of the classroom, it is also important to see the
duration of the students learn a language. For this case, Miss L says that there are three meetings
in a week and each meeting lasts for 90 minutes. It is very good because as stated by ACTFL
Performance Guidelines (in Curtain 2000) in Moon, for foreign language learning in the USA
recommends 3-5 classes a week of no less than 30-40 minutes a lesson (between 90-200 minutes
a week) throughout the year. The school where miss L teach has been making a good decision to
conduct 3 classes a week that lasts for 90 minutes.
In teaching English, there must be challenging aspects of teaching both from the teacher
itself and the students themselves. Miss L says that there is no special challenging aspect when
she teaches the students because teaching reading is quite easier than the other subjects. When
teaching reading, the teacher and the student will just focus on the text. The teacher gives a text
to the students and sees the implementation of the texts in real teaching and learning activity so
that there is no specific difficulty and it means the learning process runs well. For the students
themselves, there is no difficulty if they understand well the text and vocabulary. It becomes
challenging if they encounter a difficult text that is not suitable on their level. She also says that
the students are a little bit difficult to determine specific kind of text.
The strengths for the teachers in teaching reading are they also get more knowledge about
text and she also says that it is interesting to see the students’ improvement from time to time.
Meanwhile, the weakness in teaching reading only lies in a different background of knowledge.
Miss L said that sometimes it will be a little bit difficult to teach students on their different level
of knowledge because the class consists of new and old students so that the new students need to
adjust longer with the situation and condition in the learning place. Also, they need to be taught
based on their own level. It is included as one of the challenging aspect in teaching English in
her class. The statement of Miss L has been strengthened by the theory of Roberts (2007), she
says that “Teaching in the multilevel classroom is both challenging and rewarding.” Even though
the teachers have prepared today’s lesson very well, there must always be some obstacles that the
teacher will encounter before the end of the class session. However, the most important point is,
the feeling of the students in the class to learn something that their confidence will be uplifted
and the students will look forward to the next session.
To sum up all of theories, young learners are divided into some groups depends on the
definition of the experts. Teaching English for young learner needs to start from the lower to
higher step especially in reading. The students should be taught the basic skill in order to master
the other material by using other higher skills.
Teaching reading also needs special treatment even though teaching reading is not as
hard as other subject. The arrangement of the schedule must be considered to deliver the material
in a right way. The technique used by the teacher is very important to affect the students’
knowledge in learning new knowledge. The appropriate technique will be helpful to support and
motivate the students with different learning style and background knowledge.
In teaching reading, the teacher needs to consider the choice of texts. The different level
between the students and the texts will bring difficulties to the students. It will be hard for them
to comprehend the text and it worsens their scores and comprehension of texts.
The supporting factors include facilities and learning environment is also crucial to
motivate the children and make them more comfortable to learn by asking, sharing, and applying
what they have got. The students need to have good facility and learning environment so that
they can explore and develop something new at their age.
Teaching reading has its own challenging aspects for both the teacher and the students.
The duration for teaching and learning process in a week has a limit. The limitation of time to
teach a particular material in a week sometimes could not be done because the students do not
have much time. The policy to teach students per week has been good but the capabilities of the
students do not support the time.
 Overall, teaching reading is important for the young learners as basic skill to gain
information. Therefore, young learners need to get a lot of knowledge in reading. The multilevel
class does not mean a failure, but, the teacher must recognize that there are some ways to teach
young learners, mainly in multilevel class. The teacher should recognize each student’s ability to
help them decide the right steps for the coming session. Besides, the teacher and the students
must work together to create a supportive environment during teaching and learning session so
that it will give impact to both teacher and student.
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