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qualities help them to learn in the foreign language classroom. Halliwel 1992 explains that there are some characteristics owned by young language learners.
The characteristics are stated as follows.
a. Children’s ability to grasp meaning
It explains that young children are able to understand the meaning what is being said to them even before they understand the individual words. There are
some important elements that can help the young children to grasp meaning. The elements are intonation, gesture, facial expressions, actions, and circumstances.
Based on Halliwel 1992:3, those elements help children to tell the probably meaning of the unknown words and phrases.
In fact, the ability of children in primary school is highly developed. However, there is another important element that is owned children to grasp
meaning. According to Halliwel’s 1992:4 explanation, more importantly, particularly in terms of language development, their message –interpreting skill is
part of the way they learn new words, concepts and expressions in their mother tongue as their language expands to meet the new challenges of school. From that
statement it can be said that children have well interpreting skill in their development. Therefore, when children meet a new language at school, they will
use their skill to interpret new sounds, new words, and new structures. Regard with children’s ability, the teacher has to facilitate the students by using full of
gesture, intonation, demonstration, actions, and facial expressions to convey meaning parallel to what teacher is saying in foreign language learning process.
PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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b. Children‘s creative use of limited language resources
According to Halliwel 1992:4, in the early stages of their tongue development children excel at making a little language go a long way. In this
stage, Children are creative with grammatical forms and also creative with concepts. For example, when children get difficulty to convey meaning, they will
get other ways to convey the meaning. This children’s creative use of limited language resources occurs in the language classroom without any help from
teachers. In this case, the use of games is so important and useful. Games make children feel fun in learning process. However, the most important point is the fun
element of games create desire to communicate and create unpredictability.
c. Children capacity for indirect learning