What is going on in the minds of young learners in our classrooms? How do they see the world around themselves, and how can we as teachers give them the support they need to grow and learn? In the previous article, six pre-lesson considerations were discussed for teachers of young learners, including awareness of role modeling, effective lesson pacing, and novel task implementation (Reidak, 2024). These are all vital points to think about when planning lessons that will best serve learners’ needs and help to orient teachers toward a student-centered approach and mindset.
To this end, what does student-centered teaching look like in a classroom of very young learners? By their very nature, many children want to be independent, move only at their own pace, and are mainly motivated by their own interests. On the other hand, they require teachers to set the routine and structure for lessons, provide appropriate materials, and determine assessment, if any. It is our belief that an effective student-centered approach for young learners involves careful consideration of student contexts, interests, and needs, as well as positive role-modeling paired with opportunities for children to develop social relationships. Additionally, the application of engaging and multimodal tasks will create a variety of ways for students to participate.
Building on the pre-lesson considerations offered in part one of this series, this article will offer an overview of childhood developmental skills with a particular focus on social-emotional learning (SEL) and the characteristic mechanics of young learners’ behavior and thinking. By combining the pre-lesson considerations with the advice offered here, teachers can approach their lessons with both better preparation for and a deeper understanding of teaching young learners. For best results, if you have not already, please review Reidak (2024).
Developmental Stages of Young Children
For teachers of any student age, level, and context, it is important to know your audience, so to speak, and take into consideration student needs, interests, and backgrounds. However, for teachers working with pre-primary and primary age learners, it is even more important to become familiar with the developmental stages of children so as to create activities and lessons that best match their physical, intellectual, and emotional capabilities.
Mature or fully developed learners are generally able to adapt to a variety of teaching methods, and time in the classroom can be used to focus purely on language skills such as vocabulary, grammar, or sentence structures. Young learners, on the other hand, require a careful balance of tasks and abilities (e.g., hand-eye coordination, problem-solving, and confidence-building) that support all aspects of their development, with language being only one point. Additionally, whereas older learners often have specific goals for learning a second language, such as passing exams or for their careers, young learners in an EFL context generally do not. They acquire language skills incidentally through exposure and usage, particularly when presented in ways that are engaging, multisensory, and playful. These methods can incorporate such resources as picturebooks, songs, puppets, realia, art and craft materials, and games.
Though there are a variety of stages and milestones for tracking childhood growth, Trawick-Smith (2022) provides a useful description of four major categories for development in the preschool years:
- Physical and motor development: Children are refining their balance, strength, stamina, reaction times, and hand-eye coordination. They can run, jump, throw, catch, use eating utensils, use buttons and zippers, cut with scissors, manipulate puzzle pieces, and use writing/drawing tools.
- Cognitive development: Children are refining their ability to solve problems with internal thought, think about the past and the future, categorize objects that are similar and different, imagine objects or people, and think in unidimensional terms (focusing on one object or aspect of a problem at a time). They have increased attention spans and increased memory capabilities.
- Symbolic thought: Children are developing their use of symbols, such as words, drawings, or toys, to represent ideas, and engaging in sociodramatic play and role-play (increased complexity of pretend play with other children and more detailed themes). Linguistically, they use language to negotiate meaning and interactions with peers, along with the growth of phonology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics.
- Social and emotional development: Children are growing in their desire to be social with others, and rapidly developing their identity and self-perception, and increasing their independence, altruism and empathy with peers, and awareness and management of emotions.
When planning activities and lessons, teachers should think carefully about these four categories and try to incorporate elements from each, which help their learners to grow physically, intellectually, linguistically, and emotionally. For example, a spelling game might have learners building words called out by the teacher, using chopsticks to select the correct letters from a tray of plastic letters, and then working as a team to arrange them on a board (see Figure 1). In this way, learners are practicing not only linguistic skills but also fine-motor skills and hand-eye coordination alongside teamwork and collaboration.
Figure 1
Spelling Game
The CASEL Framework
The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) defines social-emotional learning (SEL) with five competencies, described below. Through the building and nurturing of these skills, young people “develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions” (CASEL, n.d.). For teachers of young learners, it is vital to blend these skills into activities and lessons, so that children can grow and benefit in multiple ways, such as practicing how to work together or wait patiently while playing a game that builds up phonics skills or descriptive language.
The five CASEL competencies are:
- Self-awareness: The ability to recognize and understand your own emotions and thoughts, along with how they affect behavior. This also includes recognition of your own strengths and limitations.
- Self-management: The ability to manage your own emotions and thoughts, and how to control behavior in a variety of situations. This includes stress management and the use of motivation to reach goals.
- Social awareness: The ability to see different perspectives of others, such as people from other cultures and contexts. This includes the capacity for empathy and compassion for others.
- Relationship skills: The ability to create and maintain relationships with other people and groups. This includes being able to communicate, listen, work cooperatively, negotiate conflicts, and both ask for and offer help.
- Responsible decision-making: The ability to make considered choices about social interactions. This includes thinking about fairness, ethics, safety, and the consequences of decisions within a group.
Many picturebooks include aspects of SEL as their main messages—portraying situations about friendship, family, emotions, and hardship—and can be helpful tools for prompting discussion about these topics by allowing children to think about and see themselves through the stories of other characters. This is of particular importance as young learners may still be at an egocentric stage in their development, when it is difficult for them to think about or understand the feelings of people around them, as well as how their own actions may affect others. After reading a book together, the teacher can ask questions to prompt discussion about the underlying message, bringing the children’s attention back to the events of the story and how they might mirror their own lives.
It can also be beneficial to practice SEL by bridging picturebook reading with art and craft projects, as children may not have the linguistic ability, even in their own native language, to express themselves verbally. However, they can communicate their thoughts and feelings through drawing and painting. For example, in The Color Monster (Llenas, 2018), a little girl helps a monster to understand his mixed-up emotions by separating each one with its corresponding color and imagery into its own jar. After reading the story, learners can create their own emotion cards with any pictures that they associate with those feelings, share them with their classmates, and then put them together into labeled jars to create a class set (see Figure 2).
Figure 2
Emotion Jars
The Value of Play
Play is an intrinsic part of a child’s growth, aiding in every stage of their development. At preschool age, children move from the simple imitation of toddler play to more complicated sociodramatic and role-play. Role-play activities can be very useful at this stage as they can allow children to explore a variety of roles and relationships, such as parent and child, doctor and patient, or shopkeeper and customer, along with their respective dialogue and communication (Trawick-Smith, 2022). Beyond language, important social and emotional skills (e.g., sharing, taking turns, and empathy for others) can also be practiced. Play is the way that children engage with the world around them and learn about themselves. Some important points to keep in mind when setting up these kinds of play environments in the classroom are to make props and realia available, and to give minimal direction so that children can use the full range of their imagination.
Furthermore, as a subset of play, games are an essential resource for teachers. Apart from motivating children through their enjoyable nature, many games also create space for learners to play with the sounds, words, and phrases of language, helping them to internalize it through imitation, exaggeration, and repetition. Games create a magic circle for players, described by Johan Huizinga’s book Homo Ludens (1955), in which the rules and limitations of the activity form a temporary reality in which all communication is meaningful and authentic. By their very nature, games are interactive, both socially and linguistically, and allow teachers to take on a variety of roles themselves, such as facilitator, judge, coach, and participant. For small groups of young learners, traditional games like bingo, memory, charades, and "Guess Who" can be used, and are particularly effective when adapted and reiterated for children’s specific levels, interests, and needs.
It is within instances of play and games that we can tailor the experiences to be more student-centered by creating a focus on the learners rather than the teacher. Giving learners leading roles, providing agency in how they play, and support through scaffolding rather than outright answers are all ways to emphasize student interest and motivation. For example, learners can play tic-tac-toe with a set of nine cards with the flags of different countries on them. Taking turns in groups, the children can indicate the country for their marker in a variety of ways based on what they have learned, such as a description of the colors and design of the flag, a greeting used there, naming a famous food or landmark, or even using their body to mime an aspect of that country (standing like the Statue of Liberty, moving their arms like the clock of Big Ben, or making the shape of the first letter of the country).
Additionally, games can create an important atmosphere of mystery and anticipation. This is a powerful motivation for young learners who are naturally curious, as even multiple play sessions will result in unique outcomes and unplanned language use. In many ways, games mirror many of the points that children are learning and developing as they grow, such as collaboration, competition, rules, decision-making, and focus, therefore representing an effective and multimodal resource for the classroom. Play is a fundamental part of childhood that enriches all facets of development and paves the way for continued growth and learning, so teachers should make it a significant part of their methodology.
The Value of Choice
Young children typically do not have a great deal of control over their daily lives. They are told by the adults around them what to eat, what to wear, what to do, and where to go. Giving learners agency in the classroom can be a powerful tool with many benefits (Benson, 2011), including building confidence and self-esteem, expressing creativity, and developing problem-solving skills. For example, rather than choosing a set of vocabulary items to teach, we can give them a theme and ask them to share the words they would like to learn, leading to a student-centered and collaborative lesson approach. This way, the children can take a personal role in their own learning and increase their motivation and sense of responsibility.
Games can also be designed or adapted in ways to allow children to choose their own level of interaction and difficulty, which is particularly effective in classrooms in which there is a mixture of ages and developmental levels. Clip card activities are effective in this way, by giving learners a choice of which skills to practice as each participant can easily pick a variation and decide when to challenge themselves with a more difficult skill. In this example, learners select a card from one of the available types, such as rhyming words (bear-chair), initial letter sounds (grape-ghost), consonant, vowel, consonant (CVC) words, and magic E words, attaching the wooden clip to the correct answer (see Figure 3).
Figure 3
Clip Cards
The Value of Community
Beyond academic skills, the classroom can be a valuable opportunity for building a sense of community through learners interacting with their peers and forming relationships. A supportive classroom atmosphere is the foundation for a positive learning environment where children will feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and feelings and ultimately feel a sense of belonging (Jacobs & Renandya, 2019). One way to foster a classroom community is to establish a routine such as circle-time in which learners regularly practice social, communicative, and listening skills.
Circle-time, also known as group time, is a well-known method in which the first part of every lesson is set aside for setting up a positive atmosphere, talking about the goals and expectations for the lesson, and giving learners a chance to share, often with all participants seated in a circle. Some examples of circle-time activities include asking each child how they feel, along with a picture or card with a variety of faces showing different emotions so that children can touch or point to their feelings if they cannot speak or prefer not to. Designating a helper for the lesson is also useful, allowing each child to take on a small leadership role during which they help to hand out materials, take the first turn in games, and choose a picture book and song for the end of the lesson. Circle-time is also a good opportunity to review classroom rules and discuss new ones together. Rules and expectations proposed and decided on by learners can be more potent than those simply handed down by teachers.
Conclusion
Though many non-Japanese teachers who work with very young children are employed primarily as English instructors, focusing solely on language learning can be a large-missed opportunity. For children who are still in the early stages of development, we should be familiar with all of their characteristics and developmental aspects, and whenever possible design our lessons and activities to address the whole child and promote a learner-centered mindset. In particular, many kinds of games and interactions can be utilized to practice important social and emotional skills, such as sharing, turn-taking, teamwork, and other competencies that are vital both in and outside of the classroom environment.
It is also crucial for teachers to remember the value of play for young learners. What may seem like lost class time to many is in fact a meaningful resource for children to experiment and grow in skills that will aid them in many aspects of life. Games can be key to fostering a student-centered atmosphere, by giving children agency, autonomy, and leadership roles, while shifting the focus away from the teacher at the front of the room. Choices allow learners to tailor lesson-content to their interests, increasing motivation, and helping them to take responsibility for their own learning. Finally, every classroom and school are a community, and these important social groups can be strengthened through regularly setting aside time for learners to share their thoughts and feelings and know that they belong.
A student-centered approach for young learners is one in which children can grow in ways that can benefit them in the long term, throughout their whole lives, rather than focusing on information and academic skills alone. Finding a strong balance between helping them to develop emotionally and socially while also creating an atmosphere in which learning is fun, supportive, and grounded in curiosity is key. It is our hope that this series of two short articles can help to provide some guidance toward striking this balance.
References
Benson, P. (2011). Teaching and researching autonomy. Routledge.
Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). (n.d.). What is the CASEL framework? https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/what-is-the-casel-framework/#socia...
Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. The Beacon Press.
Jacobs, G. M., & Renandya, W. A. (2019). Student centered cooperative learning: Linking concepts in education to promote student learning. Springer.
Llenas, A. (2018). The color monster: A story about emotions. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.
Reidak, J. (2024). Student-centered teaching (part one): Often overlooked pre-lesson considerations for young learner classrooms. The Language Teacher, 48(2). 20–23. https://doi.org/10.37546/JALTTLT48.2
Trawick-Smith, J. (2022). Early childhood development: A multicultural perspective. Pearson.
Martin Sedaghat is a preschool teacher and university lecturer at Niigata University of Health and Welfare. He completed his MA TESOL through Birmingham University in 2023, and his research interests include picture book use in the classroom, games and game design for young learners, and childhood second language acquisition. Originally from California, USA, he has been living in Niigata since 2003.
Jesse Reidak hails from Toronto, Canada, and currently resides in Kansai, Japan. He teaches content-based courses at a private elementary school located in Kyoto. His research interests include sustainability-related topics, cooperative learning, and task-based language teaching. He welcomes opportunities to connect with other teachers and researchers. jesse.reidak@gmail.com
