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To answer this question I will first tell you a little about my experience, I am currently a private tutor working with children and adults and have been teaching for over six years. One of the best things about teaching over a wide age range is the differences in how they learn, how I have to adapt to their needs and how to always make a lesson informative and fun. I will start with how young kids learn. In my experience, fun is the best way for kids to learn, as this is the best motivation for them to be interested in learning a second language. They usually don’t have any other English speaking friends and the teacher might be the only point of contact with the language and only during the time given per week. Making lessons fun can be done in many ways. Games are a great way to get children to ask questions, listen to answers and in this way, really engage the kids with the motivation of winning. Playing games that they already know in their language can be great games to start with if it’s too hard to explain the rules and games can be found for every age group and level. Crosswords can be very useful for vocabulary, arts and crafts can be used to do something interesting while the child copies. Songs are also a useful tool. Kids have a special ability to acquire language more naturally than adults. I think this is because they are still learning their own language and so they are very used to picking up new vocabulary and ideas. I try and read to my younger students quite often so they can hear the rhythm and stress of the words and depending on the age, so they can see how certain words are read. They also read to me while I correct them and depending on the student, this can prove to improve their overall fluency quite a bit. Now on to how adults learn. Adults learn languages for different reasons than children, examples such as travelling, work, or just out of interest. Adults usually come to language learning from some sort of need and usually have something that they want to say and then want to know how to say it. It is for this reason that most adults learn by translation. This isn’t to say that the process shouldn’t be fun, as most people won’t continue if it becomes a bore. Adults are more organised, capable of tracking their own progress, setting their own goals and are more capable of researching things they find interesting. Having conversations with adults is a great way for them to practice their English while at the same time revealing their weaknesses. I often get the adults to choose a topic that interests them to talk about and note any common mistakes while they note down any new vocabulary that they ‘discovered’. This gives them a list that they can refer to and memorise. To summarise, although there are different approaches and learning styles, language learning comes down to maximum exposure to the target language. There will always be grammar to understand and vocabulary to learn. It is how we adapt these to the target age.
