The Learning Strategies of Young Learners

16

c. The Learning Strategies of Young Learners

The way of children learning strategies will be different from adult learners. According to Anning 1991, behaviorism gives strong influence to our views on how children learn language. They said that the view lead us to see children as a blank slate who learned by giving reaction passively to different kinds of stimuli and also positive and negative feedback they received. In contrary, Piaget said that children are actively constructing his or her own thinking by acting upon the physical and social environment. Children learning strategies are influenced by their physical and their environment. Accordingly, it will be difficult to teach children if they are not ready yet to learn Anning, 1991. Hence, it can be accepted that Piaget thought that the role of language and the role of adults did not influence the way children learn something. As Vygotsky 1978 said as the contrary of Piaget theory that the role of the adult and language in children’s learning are very important. There is a difference of both theories Piaget and Vygotsky. Piaget believes that children learn through his or her own individual action and exploration, whereas Vygotsky believes that adults teachers work actively to improve children development in learning Vygotsky, 1978. According to Anning 1998, in the early 1990’s most British teachers of the young learners believe some theories as follows. 1. Children develop in sequential stages. According to Anning, children learn from the concrete to the abstract level of learning. She thinks that teachers need to 17 recognize the learning level of children to help them in understanding things. By understanding the learning level as well as understanding children characteristics, teachers are able to select the appropriate media, activities, learning style and materials. 2. Most teachers believe that children learn through concrete experiences, particularly structured play. Children need to think in a simpler way rather than complicated one. This can be accommodated by the existence of pictures. In order to remember the name of some animals, teachers can help the children by showing the pictures when students visited the zoo. By looking at the pictures, the children will memorize the name of the animals. 3. In social development, children move from egocentrism to be more socializing. In the school, children learn how to become social being. Teacher’s role is needed in encouraging children to realize the value of working together in a group or pairs. In teaching young learners, creative teachers are needed in creating a good atmosphere of learning. In order to create a joyful learning, teachers can select some media, activities, technique, as well as materials. 4. Children need to develop competence in their first language to function efficiently as learners. In order to understand the second language, in this case English, children have to master their first language to help them in communication and understand things. 5. Every child is an individual learning in their own unique way. It implies that every child is a unique individual learning that brings a unique set of experiences 18 and understanding to each new learning situation. Anning 1991 adds that it is important to keep insight into the uniqueness of each child to respect their individuality but we also need to concern and to recognize the similarities. Multiple intelligences are also known as one of learning styles. Berman 1998 said that we take in information in line with our learning style. If students are visual learning, they will mainly gain the information through eyes. In other case, if students have mainly auditory learning style; therefore information will be learned through hearing, whereas if students have mainly bodily kinesthetic learning style, they will easily learn something through movement or manipulating things. These three learning style provided by Berman 1998 are also suggested by Gardner 1993 in his theory of multiple intelligences. They are linguistic intelligence, logical- mathematical intelligence, spatial intelligence, musical intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, and intrapersonal intelligence Gardner, 1993

d. Teaching English to Young Learners