Classroom Structure Plan

Classroom management is an essential part of teaching young lerners.Here is  sample class structure plan that can help any teacher with classroom management.

GREETING	It is important to start the class in a positive way. In order to achieve that, teachers should greet students and start the class with a song, rhyme or chant to get children ready for the lesson.	Teacher: Hello children! Children: Hello teacher! Teacher: How are you today? Children: Fine! (thumbs up) Teacher: Let`s sing the Hello song HELLO SONG
DATE AND DAY	Before starting the lesson, it is important to establish the date (number of the day, month and year) and the day of the week. The teacher may ask what date or day it is and students may sing different songs so that they can answer to the teacher`s questions.	Teacher: What is today’s date? Children: Today is June 2nd, 2015. Teacher: Excellent! And what day is it today? Let’s sing the day of the week song! DAY OF THE WEEK SONG Teacher: So… What day is it today? Children: it is Tuesday.
HELPERS AND ROLL CALL	Teachers should designate the helpers of the day and take the attendance. As regards helpers, teachers may have a chart on the wall in which it is already set who are the helpers on each day of the week. So, when they establish the day, they can also know who will be the helper that day. Those helpers of the day, can also be the roll callers .	Teacher: Ok, children. Look at the helpers chart. If today is Tuesday, who are the helpers today? Children: (looking at the chart, they read aloud the names). Teacher: Great! Tuesday helpers, can you check who is absent today? Children: Is (John) here today? Yes! I`m here! /No, he is absent today.
THE LESSON  (The lesson is the lesson plan of a required textbook for a specific school, or it can be a lesson plan created by the teacher based on the school`s curriculum.) + ATTENTION GETTERS + BRAIN BREAKS	It is really important to prepare certain strategies so as to get the children attention during the lesson. Attention getters are useful to start an activity, to finish an activity, or just to get children attention. Brain breaks are as useful as attention getters: both of them help to keep students on task and keep the pace of the class.	ATTENTION GETTER Teacher: Touch your nose! Children: (Touch their noses) Teacher: Touch your feet! Children: (Touch their feet) BRAIN BREAK (After a difficult activity, to keep children from getting frustrated or bored: sing a popular song)
CLEAN UP AND HOMEWORK	After the lesson, and before ending the class, the teacher should have a designated time to clean up the classroom and to assign some homework, if any, to students.	CLEAN UP Teacher: Children, it`s time to put everything in order. PUT AWAY SONG HOMEWORK Teacher: Children! For next class you have to bring pictures of wild animals. (She gives children a reminder to paste on their notebooks)
END OF THE CLASS	The end of the class time should be marked with an established routine: using a song or rhyme to say goodbye.	GOODBYE SONG Teacher: Good-bye children! Children: Good-bye Miss Annie!

The most important thing is that every song or chant used in routines, should give students authentic language that they can use in real life, for exampe, when saying hello or good-bye to any person.

Grabbing the bull by its horns

Classroom management is an essential part of teaching young learners. Teachers of YLs need to develop a plan for managing their classrooms that will keep YLs engaged and on task, so that the process of teaching and learning can take place. The aim is to create a positive and productive atmosphere for that process to occur.

Effective teachers need to be good managers of time and activities. They need to move quickly from activity to activity because YLs have short attention spans. Managing the pace of the class also includes using fun activities, planning the materials and instructions for the activities or games before hand, and using attention getters and brain breaks.

One of the main ways to manage a class of YLs is to develop classroom routines and rules. As regards routines, Brewster, Ellis, and Girard (2002) explain: “Young children gradually become familiar with established routines that help them feel confident”. Using routines in class make children to know what is going to happen next. Apart from that, children like working within a framework of rules, i.e. boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. But we need to take into account that different classroom management approaches that teacher use can depend on their country and culture. As a consequence of this, appropriate classroom rules depend on the school culture and can defer from country to country, from region to region, and even from school to school: rules and the consequences of breaking them need to be established in accordance with the school policy. Teachers must know what the school rules are and incorporate them into their classroom, enforcing them consistently and fairly. Then, good behavior could be rewarded, but the appropriate reward will also depend on the school culture.

One of the biggest challenges that teachers have to face is the managing of classroom climate, which includes physical and emotional atmosphere. Physical environment refers to the room and seating arrangement. Teachers should create an arrangement in such a way that they can see all students from the front of the room, walk through the room easily, and seats can be move to work in pairs or groups. However, teachers do not always have the freedom to arrange the room. However, sometimes the arrangement does not depend on the teachers, but it is something that is out of their control. Emotional atmosphere should be positive and comfortable for learners to speak out and participate actively in class. The key is to build good relationships with students, but the way in which those relationships are developed will also be culturally based.

To conclude, despite the fact that there are different classroom management approaches that teachers can apply to their classrooms, their choice will be conditioned by the country in which they live, the region in which the school is located, and the school culture itself, i.e. the school rules and beliefs. 

Ingredients for Good ELT

In order to teach young learners effectively, it is important to take into account different considerations, such as the characteristics of young learners, they way in which children learn new information in general, and how they learn a new language, in particular.

Children are energetic and physically active, spontaneous, curious, imaginative, and they have short attention spans. As a consequence of this, teachers should try to engage children with fun activities that arouse their curiosity and imagination through teaching about interesting topics, such as exotic animals and plants, food, music, holidays, etcetera, and also through role plays and drama games, which allow them to use their imagination and pretend they are someone or something else. Teachers should also use children`s natural tendency to be physically active by incorporating kinesthetic activities that encourage young learners to move around, for example, the TPR (Total Physical Response) method connects language to movement. Sometimes, after concentrating very hard on an activity, teacher could give students a break to move their bodies around with some TPR activity, or even a mental break (also called “brain break”). Furthermore, teachers also need to provide opportunities for children to connect new information and language to themselves, since they are egocentric and they have difficulty perceiving things from another person`s point of view. However, children are social and they love to play games with each other. So, teachers should have a balance of activities that allow students to have various types of interaction (in pairs, in groups, as a whole class, or individually).

According to Piaget, children learn through their own individual actions and exploration. It is really important to create opportunities for children to learn by doing and to learn by interacting with their environment. Interacting with realia (real-life objects) allow students to connect the language they are learning to their everyday life. Apart from learning by interacting with their environment, children also learn by interacting with adults. The adults` role is very important in a child`s learning process: children need support and scaffolding by the teacher. Teachers must prepare their lessons by examining every task very carefully, taking into account the students` level of English and their cognitive development. Keeping children “on task” (engaged in a particular activity and working productively) is an important part of the scaffolding process, since children need reminders for what they are doing and why.

Success in English language teaching also depends on the characteristics of the classroom environment. Children may use similar processes to acquire a native language (L1) and a foreign language (L2), however, the environment for L1 and L2 acquisition can be quite different. In the L1 environment, children are surrounded by their native language: it is spoken and used in various contexts all around the child. This constant source of meaningful exposure to language in authentic contexts helps children acquire language naturally and quickly. The challenge for teaching English as a second language is to create an English-speaking classroom environment and use the language as much as possible. The language must be meaningful and used in context so as to motivate children to participate in class and learn. Children must be given not only lots of meaningful and comprehensible input, but also opportunities to produce meaningful and comprehensible output. Children will learn the language through lots of authentic and meaningful exposure to it.

Here I have mentioned the main considerations to give effective English instruction to young learners. To conclude, we can say that effective English instruction in the EFL classroom should include kinesthetic activities, songs, rhymes, drama activities, exotic topics, role plays, stories, movies, pictures, posters, poems, activities in groups and individual activities, realia, storytelling, among others, but always planning every lesson bearing in mind the characteristics of young learners and how they learn. 

Teaching Young Learners English in Chivilcoy: Benefits and Challenges

Chivilcoy is a city where most schools apply FLES programs. A FLES (foreign language in the elementary school) program is one in which children study English as just one more school subject, usually twice a week. Through this kind of program, children are able to develop different skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing skills.

One of the benefits of this type of program is that children become aware of other languages and cultures: they develop an appreciation for them. Furthermore, through extended exposure to the English language, young learners simply have more time to learn it, and that leads to greater fluency and better pronunciation. Another benefit that worth mentioning is the ability that young learners acquire to see a problem from different points of view: they develop such a mental flexibility that they can be aware not only of different cultures and languages, but also of different perspectives of a situation.

Having mentioned all these benefits about FLES programs for young learners, we should also think of the challenges they face. For example, this kind of program needs teachers properly trained with adequate proficiency in English. But it is not enough to know English. A well -trained teacher is one who has three different types of knowledge: English knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and technological knowledge.

It is important to understand that, since English is an international and intercultural language, the purpose of teaching it to young learners is to make them able to use it as a means of communication among speakers of English as an international language, and not to speak a specific variety of English. This has to do with another challenge faced when teaching English to young learners: the FLES programs teachers have to choose properly the material they work with so as to make children develop awareness of different cultures and varieties of English.

In my opinion, the most difficult challenge for teachers is to keep students motivated through all the years they study a language. I think that one way to motivate them is to make them see how the content relates to them and the world around them.