What is wrong with approaches to teaching English to young learners today?Were you puzzled when you read the title of this article, implying as it does that there is something wrong with current approaches to teaching English to young learners today. Read on! Perhaps ‘wrong’ is too strong a word, although I don’t think so. And I don’t mean to imply that everything is wrong. However, I think those of us who are interested in and concerned about teaching young learners need to take seriously several serious challenges to what we do.

If we look at the research, the challenges are clearly evident. Over 20 years ago, in a book on the age factor in second language acquisition, David Singleton wrote “there is no consistent support in the literature for the notion that younger second language learners learn more efficiently or successfully than older learners.” Recent research has indicated that there is no consistent support for the notion that the younger you begin teaching children a foreign language the better they will be. In fact, comparisons between younger learners, adolescents and adults show that young children appear to be the least effective.

Does this mean that we should abandon the teaching of foreign language to younger children? I don’t believe so. However, there are several factors that need to be taken into consideration when designing curricula and teaching materials.

1 Curriculum models should be developmentally appropriate to the age and stage of the learner.

All to often, models developed for high school students or even adults are imported into the primary classroom.

2 Methodology needs to be age appropriate

This is a crucial point. It is as inappropriate to give young learners formal grammar lessons as it is to ask adults to learn a foreign language by manipulating glove puppets.

3 Teachers must be trained to teach languages to young learners

I have done training workshops with foreign language teachers in primary schools who have no training in the teaching of young children. Very often they have no training in the teaching of language. And sometimes they not even trained teachers of any kind.

4 Intensity of instruction must be sufficient

My daughter began learning French in primary school. She had one 45 minute lesson a week. By the time the next week’s lesson came around, she had forgotten what she had learned the previous week.

5 Instruction should cater to all of the learner’s needs; physical, psychological and social

Teachers in primary school have to cater to the whole child, attending to physical and psychological needs as well as cognitive ones. The answer to the question, “What do you teach?” should not be “I teach English” but “I teach children.”

Regardless of the subject taught, our overall aim as teachers is to prepare global citizens for the 21st Century. What makes English unique is that it is both the medium and the method of learning. It is through English communication skills that all other skills and knowledge can be acquired.

Learn more: www.pearsonelt.com/ourdiscoveryisland

David Nunan is Vice President for Academic Affairs at Anaheim University, California, Emeritus Professor at the University of Hong Kong, Professor in Education at the University of NSW, and Senior Academic Advisor to Global English Corporation in San Francisco. He has published over 100 scholarly books and articles on teacher education, curriculum development, classroom-based research and the teaching of grammar in the communicative classroom. Recent books include Task-Based Language Teaching (Cambridge University Press), Practical English Language Teaching: Grammar (McGraw-Hill), What is This Thing Called Language? (Palgrave Macmillan), with Phil Benson, Learners’ Stories Difference and Diversity in Language Learning (Cambridge University Press) and with Kathi Bailey, Exploring Second Language Classroom Research (Cengage /Heinle). His latest publication, co-edited with Julie Choi, is Language and Culture: Reflective Narratives and the Emergence of Identity, published by Routledge.

David Nunan