Theories of learning and development
In this course, we focus on more practical aspects surrounding teaching English to young learners. However, for you to succeed as a teacher in this environment, you must also be introduced to some fundamental theories which analyze the general development of young learners.
Being familiar with these theories will not only be beneficial when you are teaching young learners, but it’ll also help outside of the classroom.
Why this is important for in-class teachers:
If you’re teaching English in a physical school (not online), your time will be split between classroom hours, and those spent in the school preparing lessons or on breaks in the staff room. Your time won’t be spent in isolation – you’ll often meet other local teachers that have been through extensive degree programs relating to teaching.
Local teachers will still expect you to have a similar level of academic understanding surrounding the wider principles of education. Learning about such topics can help you to integrate more with your school and engage with your colleagues. It will also help to open up further career opportunities, either with higher level teaching positions or with moving into curriculum development.
Why this is also important for online teachers:
If you’re teaching online you’ll likely either work for a company which provides all the pre-made lesson materials for you (such as with DaDa/VIP Kid/Magic Ears), or you’ll be teaching on a more open platform where you’ll be hired directly by parents and teach their children with more flexibility.
In the first scenario, it can sometimes be frustrating to teach pre-made lesson plans without having the ability to use too much of your own judgment. However, these companies will have spent thousands and thousands of dollars to develop their curriculum, and will usually have some underlying theory underpinning what’s being taught and how the lessons are devised. Understanding the overall theory behind the lessons can help to explain the choices made and the activities selected.
With the second scenario mentioned, you’ll be responsible for planning not just lessons, but a whole study plan. Being able to leverage a particular theory can be useful when forming lesson plans, but perhaps more importantly, it can help if you need to explain your approach to parents.
Telling parent “I teach like this because it’s the best way.” offers much less reassurance than “I incorporate part of Lev Vygotsky’s scaffolding concept in my lessons as it helps students to develop greater independence with ESL learning.”
Introducing learning theories:
In this section, we’ll be looking at two prominent theories; the first by Jean Piaget, and the second by Lev Vygotsky.
After covering these theories, we’ll compare them and see how they can help ESL teachers in particular. It’s important to note that both of these theories were developed over many years of work, and all of their intricacies can’t be covered in a short course such as this. This should serve as a springboard for you to do further research into their published works online.