Week 3: Getting to Understand Children !

Hello and assalamualaikum everyone especially to Madam Foziah and Cohort Five.… There are 2 more years to go before we end our teaching training course and from that moment, we will be called “teacher” by our future students, insyaallah. However, do we really know how children go through their growing process? We should realize that every child is different in terms of their growing process. They are unique as they have different learning styles, different preferences, and they also have their own ability in grasping new knowledge.


As future teacher, we are trained to be aware of these aspects. Why should we lean about all these things? There are many reasons for this question. We should be aware of children’s differences so that we will be able to carry out effective teaching and learning process. By knowing these aspects, we can also make reflections on our teaching whether they are able to understand what we teach or it goes the other way around. Then, based on the reflections, we as teachers will be able to think of and plan more effective teaching strategies in order to give them better understanding in their learning. This would definitely help teacher to create an optimal learning condition for the children. The optimal learning condition would be the best environment for students to learn. This is essential in order for teachers to have students who become leaders and grow within the classroom.


For this week, we focused on the qualities that help children in learning foreign language and how teacher can build on them. There are 6 components of children’s abilities that may help them in foreign language classroom. Those components are as follows:

1) Children’s ability to grasp meaning- In terms of language development, the message-interpreting skill of the children is part of the way they learn new words, concepts, and expressions. Therefore teachers should make full use of gestures, intonation, demonstration, actions, and facial expressions to convey meaning so that they could have better understanding in learning foreign language.

2) Children’s creative use of limited language resources- Children have the ability to use many ways for conveying the meaning even they do not know the word or grammatical structure for what they want to say. This actually occurs in language classroom even without teacher’s help. This occurs especially when there are activities that generate real interaction or call on the imagination. Therefore, games play an important role as they are not just for fun, but they could create a desire to communicate and also unpredictability.

3) Children’s capacity for indirect learning- Learning occurs in two ways, directly and indirectly. Children sometimes learn better than the way they should be learning. This means that they tend to focus on other things else although teachers are controlling the activity fairly closely. According to Halliwell ( 1992), this is part of the rather complex phenomenon of indirect learning. This would be an advantage for teachers to use language activities which involve them in guessing what phrase or word someone has thought of.

4) Children’s instinct for play and fun- Children are always trying to find and make fun. This would be an advantage for teachers to create activities such as guessing activities. Through their sense of fun and play, children are living the language for real.

5) The role of imagination- The capacity for fantasy and imagination has a very constructive part to play in the language classroom. It would be good if teachers could incorporate the elements of imagination and fantasy. As a result, the teachers would be able to create activities that provide very powerful stimulus for real language use.

6) The instinct for interaction and talk- This is the most important for the language teachers. This is because the instinct for interaction and talk is one of the most powerful motivators for using the language. As teachers, we are to make sure that the desire to talk is for learning, not against learning.


To understand better about these 6 components, we were assigned to be in groups and each group would have to present one of the elements as mentioned above.

The tasks were as follows:

1. Read through all the section of the selected component.
2. Pick up important part.
3. Search materials that enhance learning based on the component.
4. Prepare a power point presentation.


These are a few pictures of our presentation: