Why young learners need extra attention

When teaching teenagers and adult students, we can rely more on traditional social skills that we might use in everyday life.

Such lessons will focus more on discussions with your students. You will have more opportunities to rationalize different phrases and grammar points, and will be able to anchor these to real-life situations that your students can relate to.

For example, it can be easy to explain basic tenses (present/past/future) to an adult student as they will likely already be very familiar with these concepts in their native language. Comparably, with teenage students, it can also be quite easy to explain the difference between formal and informal greeting phrases, as they will likely be familiar with different phrases used to greet their friends or teachers/adults.

However, with young learners you’ll need to use a whole different approach.

Younger students learn more through discovery, play, and immersion.

They are also motivated in different ways. While adults and teenage students might have a genuine interest in studying (something we refer to as intrinsic motivation), young learners generally have very little personal interest in studying the English language. This means that you’ll need to use techniques to engage the students and reward their participation in lessons (extrinsic motivators).

While you might now be thinking that adult classes would be an easier option to pursue instead of young learners, there are some advantages with teaching younger students.

Teenagers and adults can be less flexible with their mindsets. Young learners can be more likely to accept new information and store it to memory without questioning it. However, with teenage and adult students they might halve pre-existing thoughts that you’ll need to overcome.

For example: An adult in China might have used the sentence “你幾歲?” (“Nǐ jǐ suì?”) for over 30 years.

This sentence translates literally as “You how old?”.

When introducing the same sentence in English, it might be a challenge for the adult to change their ways and say “How old are you?“. Young learners often have a higher degree of “plasticity” and may more readily take on new language models.