C- stands for Cognitive Needs

This week I had the fortune to meet a group of young English teachers preparing for their Young Learners Certification. In a discussion moment about young learners' physical, emotional, and cognitive needs, several interesting points were brought up by these young practitioners. One of their main concerns was to fulfill the cognitive needs of their pupils since they reckon this area of paramount importance. The field of teaching English to young learners has expanded enormously in the last ten years. However,  Cameron (2001) suggests that implications for teaching young learners need to be addressed from beyond the classroom and children should be considered as active learners. In her paper, Cameron highlights key ideas from Piaget's and Vygotsky's work that can provide information about how we think of children as language learners. Although Piaget gives less importance to the role of language in cognitive development than does Vygotsky, we ought to acknowledge that Piaget's argumentation of the limited capacity of children as sense-makers of other people's actions and language is key to understanding how they respond to the tasks and activities we plan in the language classroom. On the other hand, Vygotsky posits that language provides children with a new tool for doing things and for organising information. But he also states that adults play an important role in helping children learn by reading them stories, asking them questions, and talking to them while they are playing. We can conclude then, that as adults and as teachers of young learners, we must make the world accessible to them since "the ability to learn through instruction and mediation is characteristic of human intelligence" (Cameron, 2001, p 6).

Some ways in which we can cater to the children's cognitive needs is by providing them with plenty of opportunities to develop numeracy and literacy skills.  And by giving them activities to think abstractly. In the following link, you will find an extraordinary work by Herbert Puchta "Developing thinking skills in the young learner' classroom" 💡.  I hope you find it useful to cope with the challenges of the 21st- Century language classroom. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lB8R6PsiTydX5xHNzF7znXKzFeFbSoOB/view?usp=sharing

Reference:

Cameron, L. (2001). Children learning a foreign language. Teaching Languages to Young Learners, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511733109.002