Young learners have many characteristics that make children excited and inspiring as well as challenges.
First of all, children are energetic and physically active. This characteristic makes young learners like doing lots of activities and they can’t stay in action for a long time. In fact, teachers can organize various action activities to help them develop both physical, mental, and language by using total physical response, song, music, or other activities requiring movement. On the other hand, young learners are difficult to manage because they have too much energy and want to do anything they want. For example, children don’t follow the instructions or mobility when they are asked to sit in a location.
Moreover, young learners are spontaneous and not afraid to participate which makes children enjoy almost all activities with the most confidence resulting in the development of language skills especially speaking skills because they aren’t afraid to talk as well or afraid to talk incorrectly. In addition, mistakes in the learning process are easy to fix because they can be repeated too many times without sky. Despite these benefits, teachers have to have good classroom management and monitoring skills to make students take negative actions such as kicking or punching others.
Another characteristic of children is curious and receptive to new ideas. For younger, the world is new so they like to expose and recept anything new and interesting. Children also easily learn with any topic they are curious about such as culture or animals. However, the information provided to students has to be exact because this is the receptive process of a child and it’s hard to change when they grow, pronunciation is an example, if they listen and repeat correctly it has more benefits for learning after but if they incorrect children have to spend lots of time to fix when they mature. Besides that, the teacher should find diverse interest activities to capture children’s attention.
Egocentric and relating new ideas to themselves is one of the personalizations of young learners that help children like learn more about what is related to their experience as well as facing the interest in other sides of life. Social and learning to relate to others is the thing that should be considered. Students tend to share their stories, and ideas or play with peer, teachers, or family which lead to distraction in learning if they are talkative, have too much energy, and are spontaneous.