Characteristics of Children’s Learning Materials

Language which the children acquire is language the children can easily use in spontaneous conversation 4 Variety in the classroom Varieties in the classroom are necessary, for example, varieties of activities, varieties of organizations, and varieties of choices. 5 Routines Children benefit from knowing the rules and being familiar with the situation. The materials should have systems and routines. The teachers should organize and plan their lessons through familiar situations and familiar activities. This can be done, for example, by repeating stories and rhymes. 6 Cooperation not competition The materials should avoid rewards and prizes. Other forms of encouragement are much more effective by making room for shared experiences. They are an invaluable source of language work and create an atmosphere of involvement and togetherness. Most of children enjoy the feeling of belonging and this is particularly true of young children. 7 Grammar Children have an amazing ability to absorb language through play and other activities which they find enjoyable. How good they are in a foreign language is not dependent on whether they have learnt the grammar rules or not. 8 Assessment Even though formal assessment may not be a compulsory part of the teacher’s work, it is always useful for the teacher to make regular notes about each child’s progress. The teacher may want to tell parents how their children are doing, and the teacher should be talking to the children regularly about their work and encouraging self-assessment. From the beginning this can be done in very simple terms, stressing the positive side of things and playing down what the pupil has not been able to master. Nothing succeeds like success. Brewster and Ellis 2002: 244 state that assessment at primary level can be described as an attempt to analyze the learning that a child has achieved over a period of time as a result of the classroom teaching learning situation. Assessment does not need to be based on a particular task nor is it always expressed as a percentage or mark. It may include a teacher’s subjective opinion of the achievement of a child in term of attitude, participation and cognitive development. Assessment is also assessed ‘relatively’ in that the progress of an individual child can be measured against his or her individual starting points and abilities, instead of being compared with skills and abilities of other children. Based on the theories above, assessment for kindergarten children focuses more on the process of teaching learning. It is done through children’ performance, interaction, listening comprehension: giving verbal and non-verbal responses, frequency of children’ responses, and children’ affective factors: anxiety and motivation Brown 2004: 207. Children learn directly and directly. When teachers are controlling activity fairly closely, children sometimes seem to notice something out of the corner of their eyes and to remember it better than what they were actually supposed through interesting and suitable learning tasks which encourage them to get information from variety sources. The activities should be flexible enough to move on the next activities when children are getting bored.

d. The Principles of Effective Materials for Children

Material design is crucial in language learning. Hutchinson and Waters 1987: 96 refer to terms materials development for the writing of materials, while Tomlinson 1998: 2 states the materials development refers to anything which is done by writers, teachers or learners to provide sources in ways which maximize the likelihood intake. Nunan 1989: 10 suggests that in analytic terms, tasks will contain some forms of input data which might be verbal for example a dialogue or reading passage or non verbal for example a picture sequence and an activity which is in some way derived from the input and which sets out what the learners are to do in relation to the input. The task will also have implicitly or explicitly goals and roles for teachers and learners. While in synthetic terms, lesson and units of works will consist of sequences of tasks, and the coherence of such lessons or units will depend on the extent to which the tasks have been integrated and sequenced in some principled way. The diagrammatic representation of the task and its constellation of elements are as follows: Figure 2: Diagram of Task Component In details, Nunan describes the components of tasks as follows: 1 Goals The first component is goals. Goals are what to reach behind the learning tasks Nunan, 1989: 48. Goals relate to a range of general outcomes communicative, affective or cognitive or directly describe the teacher or the learner behavior. Goals are not always explicitly stated, but they are the good starting point to be designed in the syllabus. 2 Input The second component is input. Input refers to the data that form the point of departure for the task. Input can be found out of any sources, such as invoices, drawings, family trees, shopping list, magazine quizzes, etc. Nunan, 1989: 53. Meanwhile, Hutchinson and Waters 1987: 108 say that input may be a text, dialogue, video-recording, diagram or any piece of communication data depending on the needs that have defined in the analysis. The input provides a number of things, such as stimulus material for activities, new language items, and correct models of language use their information processing skills, and opportunities for learners to use their existing knowledge both of the language and the subject matter. Goal Input Activities Teacher role Learner role Setting Task