The Role of Understanding Young Learners Character
Young learners are children between six to twelve years old.
It refers to the elementary school students of the Indonesian schooling system.
This kind of period is extremely important in the development of the way to
learn English as target language. As stated by Finocchiaro (1988) that
childhood is the best time to acquire the beginnings of goodwill and
intercultural understanding, because they are singularly free of prejudice.
Furthermore, Halliwel (1994) stated that the students do not come to the
language classroom empty-handed. They have their own strategy and
characterization to understand the target language. Those theories above
support why teachers should open their understanding to the characteristic of
each students. It explains that the more teacher know the character of each
students, the more they will get better awareness to create appropriate
strategy, instruction or situation of the learning process in the classroom. It
of course will help the students in acquiring language in the classroom.
Therefore, the teacher should understand completely young learners’
characteristic to build up classroom interaction between teacher-students,
students-students and students-target language from the physical aspect, social
aspect and psychological aspect.
Physical aspect refers to students’ active movement or activity to get
understanding the target language. This kind of aspect is very dominant at all
times in learning process because they are in the growth period. They perform
everyday activities such as playing, drawing, talking, writing, or even running
everywhere. In this situation, teachers should not panic or annoyed to young
learners’ behavior. They have to take the advantage of the students’ active
movement by creating certain strategy and activity to bring them in the
classroom interaction. Due to young learners have understanding through their
hands, eyes, and ears, so here are three types of activities that can be used
by the teacher such as visual activity, auditory activity and kinesthetic
activity. Here are examples of activities that can be used by teacher such as
guessing pictures, story-telling, playing games or singing.
The second aspect is social relationship of young learners.
It refers to their awareness to have relationship to others. Basically,
children are social learners. They delight in playing, working and sharing
their experience to other friends. They have own awareness to create a
friendship and how to interact with others. Smart teacher will exploit the
orientation of students’ relation by creating kinds of activities involve group
work or pair work in the classroom activity. It crucially purposes for the
students to join, participate and have interaction among them to achieve
language acquisition confidently. There is no way for teacher to ignore young
learners’ characteristic in socializing with others except exploiting this to
be more useful for teaching learning process. Teacher should support their language as needed, provide opportunities for
learners to communicate with teacher and with one another. There are so
many activities that can be used by the teacher in group work or pair work such
as doing task in groups or pairs, discussing, sharing their experience,
information gap activity, and many others.
The last aspect is psychological side of young learners. It refers to their
awareness, thought or mind to the learning process. Mostly, young learners have
uncontrolled situation in their mind. Although they have positive things in
psychological aspect to learn something, they also have negative things in it.
For example, young learners have high curiosity, short concentration span, they
like imitating, disobedient, get bored easily, and many others. Many factors
involves that can affect them in learning process such examples above. Teacher
should not worry to the problems teaching young learners because those are
their way to learn something. And teacher should take advantages based on each
characteristic of young learners by seeking a way or creating the strategies
and activities to help the in acquiring language because every single problem
always has its solution. Teacher can teach students as a friend to make closer,
give the opportunity to explore themselves by their own character, keep
children from becoming too frustrated, and young
learners should have fun with English. These kinds of strategy can easily
accepted by the young learners to acquire language.
From all of the aspects above, it is extremely crucial for every teacher to
understand their students’ characteristic completely from the physical aspect,
social aspect and also their psychological aspect. Because it can help the
teacher to create a better interaction among teacher-students,
students-students, and students-target language by giving appropriate method,
strategy, instruction or situation in the classroom. It also helps the young
learners to get opportunities and to be more confident in language acquisition.
In short, effective teaching of young learners promotes innate language
acquisition mechanisms by providing such kinds of teaching strategy refer to
students’ characteristic to help their function “at the growing edge”.
