Ministry of higher and secondary special education of the republic of uzbekistan samarkand state institute of foreign languages

Sensory Input: children need to have all five senses stimulated
• Do total physical response activities
• Projects and other hands on activities can help children internalize language
• Sensory aids here and there help children internalize their concepts (e.g touch, taste, watch, etc.)
• Non-verbal language is important
Affective Factors
• Help your students to laugh with each other at various mistakes that they all make
• Be patient and supportive to build self-esteem
• Elicit as much oral participation as possible from students especially the quieter ones
Authentic, meaningful language
• Children are focused on what this new language can be used for here and now
• Children are good at sensing language that is not ‘authentic’ therefore ‘canned’ (no variation) language will likely be rejected
• Language needs to be context embedded (story lines, familiar situation and characters, real-life situation, etc)
• A whole language approach is important (show the importance and the connection among all language skills)
Teaching Teens
• Between twelve and eighteen
• Teens are an age of transition, confusion, self-consciousness, growing and changing bodies and minds
• Teens are in between childhood and adulthood

Some consideration when teaching teens
• Intellectual capacity of abstract operational thought adds at around the age of twelve. Therefore, complex problems can be solved with logical thinking.
• Attention span is lengthening as a result of intellectual maturation but it can be shortened due to many diversions in a teenager’s life.
• Varieties of sensory input are still important but increasing capacities for abstraction lessen the essential nature of appealing to all five senses
• Factors surrounding ego, self-image, and self-esteem are the top of their concerns. Therefore, one of the most important concerns of the secondary teachers is to keep self-esteem high by:
- avoiding embarrassment of students at all costs
- affirming each person’s talents and strengths
- Allowing mistakes and other errors to be accepted
- de-emphasizing competition between classmates
- encouraging small-group work where risks can be taken more easily by teens


Teaching Adults
• Adults are more able to handle abstract rules and concepts but too much abstract generalization about usage and not enough real life language use can be deadly for adults, too
• Adults have longer attention span for materials that may not be interesting for them but keeping your activities short and sweet applies also to adult-age teaching
• Do not underestimate the emotional factors that may be attendant to adult second language learning
• Adults with their more developed thinking ability are better able to understand a context-reduced segment of language
• The involvement of multiple senses in adult language learning can make the class more alive
• Although adults cannot express complex thinking in the new language, they are mature in cognition and emotions. Therefore, respect them for the deeper thoughts and feeling that may be trapped by a low proficiency level.
• Give your students as many opportunities as possible to make choices about what they will do in and out of the classroom.
• Do not treat adults in your class like children by calling them ‘kids’, using caretaker talk or talking down to them
• Do not discipline adults in the same way as children.