Teaching Young Learners

I am working as a consultant for a large English language-teaching center in Jakarta, Indonesia. The center has about 4,000 adolescent and adult students aged 12-50 studying English as a foreign language. The center has enjoyed a reputation for offering high-quality English language instruction for over 30 years. In the past year they have added a new program for young learners aged 3-11 and have hired me to spend a week with them, offering workshops for the teachers in the new program and reviewing and offering feedback on the curriculum they are developing. Even though the program is very new, they have over 500 young learners enrolled so far and are offering programs three afternoons and two mornings a week and all day on the weekends. Some adult-level teachers have moved to the young learners program, some adult teachers are teaching additional courses in the young learners program, and the center has hired new teachers and many of them have never taught young learners. Since the program was added so quickly and the program grew much faster than anticipated, there was not enough time to create an effective curriculum. Consequently, some important concepts are not being taught. In the absence of appropriate materials, some adult-level teachers are using materials from their adult courses. The program is experiencing a number of growing pains and the administrators are eager to discuss them with me and to generate solutions to the difficulties they are facing. In my initial meeting with the center’s administrators and the Directors for the Young Learners Programs I asked some questions in order to better understand their motivation for adding the Young Learner Program and allowing it to expand so quickly. [Personal notes – Christison]

Task: Reflect

What questions do you think the consultant in the vignette above intended to ask the program administrators? Why do you think the center added a program for young learners? Is the teaching of young learners different from teaching adolescents and adults? Do you think the adult teachers in the center above will have difficulties teaching young learners? What might some of

those difficulties be? Why are English language teaching programs for young learners becoming so popular around the world?