My Experience of Teaching English for Children

Here, I would like to share my experience in teaching English for EFL of young learners. They are coming with their own unique backgrounds and characteristics. Sometimes, facing them is not always easy as we imagine. Well, yesterday, we had an English course of elementary students for about 12 students and the topic was clothing. Teacher prepared a lesson plan before coming to the class. They did flashcard activities to practice and review the clothing vocabularies, such as repeating words, ‘missing card’,  ‘grab it fast’ game, ‘guess what’, and coloring. First, teacher showed all the flashcards and students repeated the pronunciation of the names of clothes. Teacher repeated this activity about twice or three times. The flashcards used in this activity were colorful large cards with word and picture on them. Students practice the names of clothes. After that, they played a game called ‘guess what’ inspired by British Council. Teacher showed a card slowly behind a board and students guessed what the word was. Student with the right answer won a point (students had a difficulty in pronouncing a word in English). 

In this English course, teacher thinks that there should be some activities to review the names of clothes, so that they can memorize as many words as possible. The next activity was ‘missing card’, teacher took five cards and showed to the students quickly. They repeated the pronunciation of those words from the teacher and in the middle of showing the cards; teacher hid a picture, then asked “what’s missing?” (Translating to L1, because my students do not know the meaning and for the second time, students still had difficulty of right pronunciation). The last activity was ‘grab it fast!’. Students were divided into two teams which lined up. First player of each time must run the picture calling out by the teacher and grabbed it fast. Team with the most card won the game and they got star sticker. 

In these games, students were really engaged and enjoyed all the steps, but when they called out a word of clothing names, they had a difficulty in pronouncing some words. They still made mistakes about the right pronunciation though they had practiced for many times. I think it is because the topic is new for them and never learnt before. Besides that, we still need to translate the words into L1, even though there is a picture corresponding a word on the card. Some of students, even, do not know certain names of clothes in their L1. It is another problem of teaching English for EFL students. As you know, my students live in a small village at suburban area of a city in Trenggalek, East Java, Indonesia. They have limit information or knowledge about English. So, here I would like to ask you, do you have the same experience as me? And how can you solve all the problems you have? What is the proper technique to teach my students about right pronunciation and vocabularies based on my experience above?