Quotation Paragraph

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”.