Week 3 - say what?

This week was all about how children learn a language. We were divided into 6 groups and each group had to present on the subtopics in the first chapter of Susan Halliwell's Teaching English in the Primary Classroom Together with Dominic, Emma, Fiza, Nazrul and Sabrina, we were to present 1.1 - Children's ability to grasp meaning.

Basically this subtopic explains to us that children do not use words to first learn a language. Rather, they make use of intonations, gestures, facial expressions, actions and circumstances to help tell them what the said utterances might mean. This is how they start to understand the language.
Soliloquy: AHA! Now I know why children always say "yes" to me when I ask them
if they understand something when they do not..they were just responding to my gestures and intonations.

So what do we do with this, shall I say 'skill'? Well, we nurture it and never ever ever discourage it or undermine its importance in the child's language development. Think about it. Even we adults, when learning a new language, tend to go for people's gestures, intonations and facial expressions to guide us in understanding them if we did not understand what they were speaking. If we need these skills, then so do the children.

What really opened my mind and cemented this school of thought in my mind was when one of the other groups ahowed a video of how the early developmental stages of a child's language development. that really showed the third subtopic - Children's capacity for indirect learning

In a way, this lesson has taught me one of the fundamentals of language development in children. It might not have been about creating resources for english language learners, however it does teach us on the prerequisites needed to create resources that cater to children's learning abilities.

Cheerios~