Preface simplifications about working with children and thereby increasing the ‘quality of foreign language education, Misunderstandings about teaching young leamers (1): teaching children is straightforward In many societies, teaching children is seen as an extension of mothering sather than as an intellectual enterprise. Teachers at primacy level are then often given less traning, lower stacus, and lower pay, than their colleagues in the same educational system who teach teenagers of adults. Children do have a less complicated view of the world than older shildren and adults, but this fact does not imply that teaching children is simple or straightforward. On the contrary, the teacher of children nceds to be highly skilled to reach into children’s worlds and lead them to develop their understandings towards more formal, more extensive and differently organised concepts, Primary teachers need to understand hhow children make sense of the world and how they learn; they need skills of analysing learning tasks and of using language to teach new ideas to groups and classes of children. Teaching languages to childsen needs all the skills of the good primary teacher in managing children and keeping them on task, plus 2 knowledge of the language, of language teaching, and of language learning. Misunderstandings about teaching young learners (2): children only need to learn simple language It is also misleading to think that children will only leam simple language, such as colours and numbers, nursery rhymes and songs, and talking about themselves. Of course, if that is all they are caught, that will be all that they can learn. But children can always do more than we think they can; they have huge learning potential, and the foreign language classroom does chem a disservice if we do not exploit that potential. Teachers often tell me that they worry about their “slow learners’. When I talk to the children and watch lessons, I do see some childcen struggling with wrieten English, but moze often I see “fast” learners who already know most of the vocabulary in their text books and are keen to use their English co talk about international topics like football, pop music and clothes. Many children around the world, including those who live in isolated communities, become part of aPreface lobal community of English language users when they watch television and use. computers. Children need more than ‘simple’ language in the sense that only ‘simple’ topics are covered. Children are interested, or can be interested, in topics chat are complicated (like dinosaurs and evolution}, difficult (like how computers work), and abstract (like why people pollute their own environment or commit crimes). This is one reason why, in this book, I avoid taking a so-called ‘child-centred? approach, and adopt instead a learningucentred approach, hoping to avoid patronising children by assuming limits to their interests. There is a second way in which chilérga need more than ‘simple’ language, and that is in terms of language structures. Ie is becoming clearer and clearer that frst language development builds from a lexical base, and that grammar emerges from lexical and communicative development. Children use supposedly ‘difficule’ structures in their frst languages as part of their lexical repertoires. In foreign language teaching, some syllabuses for primary children look eather like watered- down secondary syllabuses, which present children with just a few of the siructures typically found early on at secondary level, such as the Present Continuous tense for describing current actions, Simple Present for describing habinial action, and prepositions. In this way, adding on primary level language teaching in a school system merely stretches out ‘what has been done before over 2 longer period of time. Itmay be moze fruitful to consider the possibilty of primary level language teaching providing children with a broad discourse and lexical syllabus, that chen changes focus as they move into later stages: If children learn a foreign language from the age of 5 or 6 until they leave school at about x6 years ‘old, there is time to be imaginative with the syllabus and methodology, changing as the child changes and grows. This prospect should be of interest and concer to secondary sectors too; as language leaming begins at younger and younger ages, children will azive in secondary classrooms with much higher and more diverse levels of the foreign language than teachers will have been accustomed to ‘The organisation of the book ‘The book starts with 2 review of learning theories and language learning research that offer insights in how to think about young children Jeaming a foreign language (FL). A central principle for teaching young, learners is that children should be supported in constructing meaning for every activity and language use in the FL classroom, and that understanding is essential for effective learning. From this, the second. chapter focuses on tasks and activities, and the language learning