Challenges for ELT from the

expansion in teaching children

Lynne Cameron
This paper argues that the continuing expansion of teaching English to young
learners (TEYL) brings challenges to the wider ELT eld. It discusses why
starting younger may not bring automatic improvement to language
standards unless teacher education and secondary language teaching both rise
to the challenges of the new situation. Young learners will need to be
motivated to continue learning for ten or so years, and will bring very mixed
levels of language to the secondary classroom. Responses from other sectors of
ELT, as well as the development of eective TEYL, can benet from deeper
understanding of how children approach language learning. Two key features
of child foreign language learning are summarized: childrens search for
meaning in language use, and the demands of initial literacy. Implications
include rethinking the construct language, developing appropriate
assessment, a change in approach at the switch to secondary level, and making
realistic decisions about training teachers.
The expansion of Around the world, increasing numbers of children are starting to learn
teaching English to English at ever younger ages. Not only are the numbers of child learners
young learners increasing, but the context within which they learn continues to
formalize and commercialize. Increasing numbers of coursebooks for
young learners are being published. Alongside the lowering of the age at
which state schools start teaching English, many parents are willing and
able to pay for their children to have lessons outside the school system.
This in turn is driving an increase in testing young learners to satisfy
parents and schools desire for externally validated measures of
achievement, with, for example, an estimated 150,000 children sitting
the UCLES Tests for Young Learners in the year 2000.
I want to suggest that the expansion of Teaching English to Young
Learners (TEYL) is a phenomenon that needs to be taken seriously by the
ELT eld. It is not a minor change that can be left to young learner
experts, but a shift that will have knock-on eects for the rest of ELT,
particularly secondary level

teaching and teacher education. For

secondary teachers, there will be two major areas of impact: the need to
cope with classes of mixed levels of language skills and knowledge, and
the task of maintaining or restoring motivation over these long periods of
language learning. Secondary teachers of English will be faced with rst-
year classes who have been learning the language for perhaps ve or
ELT Journal Volume 57/2 April 2003

Oxford University Press 105

more years, and who have reached varying levels of prociency. Even if
TEYL has been very successful, children will remember dierent
amounts of language, will have become more or less uent and
condent, and will range from procient readers and writers to those in
need of remedial help. If the benets of an early start are not to be lost,
secondary teachers will need to nd ways to start from where their new
pupils are. What they do and how they teach will also need to maintain
motivation over ten or so years of language learning. If unsuccessful
early learning demotivates pupils, and they come to believe that English
lessons are dicult, or boring, or a waste of time, then secondary
teachers will not only need to keep pupils motivated for a further ve
years: somehow they will also have to remotivate those who already feel
they cannot succeed in language learning.
There are several very real reasons why we should be quite cautious
about predicting success for TEYL. Previous expansions in teaching
foreign languages to children, e.g. in the UK in the 1960s and 70s,
encountered problems at the transfer to secondary stage. This current
expansion has always had problems with nding enough teachers with
appropriate skills (Rixon 2000), and there is some evidence already that
results of YL programmes may not be as good as expected (Nikolov
2000). The theoretical and empirical research bases for expanding TEYL
are not very rm. A frequent motivation for change in policy seems to be
public or government perceptions of falling standards in foreign
language capabilities, combined with parental demands. Both parents
and policy makers often seem to be persuaded by the popular idea that,
in learning a language, earlier means better. This notion derives from
intuitive feelings that learning is easier for children, perhaps because
adults have forgotten the struggles they went through, and also perhaps
because it is assumed that the (apparently) eortless development of
bilingual skills in immersion situations will transfer to foreign language
learning contexts, in which children may only rarely encounter the
language outside the classroom. While there is some evidence that young
learners develop better accents and listening skills, there is also evidence
that, even in immersion situations, production skills and grammatical
knowledge do not benet as much as might be expected.
A further important issue is over-reliance at primary level on literacy
skills in English. Learning to read and write in English is not simple, and
when classroom teaching and learning depend on being able to read and
write, some children will always begin to fall behind or to failnot
because they cannot learn to speak English, but because they need more
time to master the complications of reading and writing.
My argument, then, is that the expansion in TEYL signals a potentially
major shift in ELT that needs to be taken seriously. We need to
understand what happens in child foreign language learning, so that
teachers can be trained eectively, and so that later learning can build on
the early stages. Teacher education and secondary foreign language
teaching that take TEYL seriously may look quite dierent from earlier
models that served a system in which language learning began around
11 years of age.
106 Lynne Cameron
Taking TEYL seriously involves multiple strands of work, much of which
is only just beginning: carrying out new research, learning from
programmes across a range of contexts and situations, and
understanding more about the nature of child foreign language learning.
It is this latter dimension that I want to explore in this paper. I suggest
that two key aspects of child language learning can help conceptualize
TEYL in its own terms, as a necessary step in exploring the impact of TEYL
more generally. Firstly, it is important to consider how children react
when they encounter new language. Secondly, we need to consider the
implications of the fact that children do not come to foreign language
learning with established literacy skills. The next section of the paper
expands these aspects of child foreign language learning. The
implications are used to suggest how we can usefully conceptualize
language as the content and goal of ELT, in ways that will assist the
development of TEYL and allow us to consider how to build on early
language learning experiences at secondary level and beyond.
Children learning a From their early days, infants are motivated to communicate with other
foreign language people. At 3 or 4 days old, they begin to be aware of faces, and early rst
The search for language learning occurs through the continuing interaction of the child
meaning with adults. The young child is incorporated as a partner in social
interaction before s/he can talk, and the gradually developing sounds and
words of the rst language (or even non-linguistic burps and coughs) are
responded to as genuine communicative oerings. Meaning is found in
action and in interaction. The work of Margaret Donaldson (1978)
revealed how children of around 7 years of age participate in talk with the
expectation that they are involved in meaningful social interaction
when adults or other children talk to them, they expect to be able to make
sense of the talk, and they interpret what is said in the light of the action
they are involved in, and what their previous experience leads them to
expect to happen.
When they come to foreign language learning, children bring with them
this tendency to search for meaning and intention. A vivid example of
this was given to me by a Korean YL teacher. Her class was taught I like,
I dont like using the topic of food, with much practice of sentences such
as I like pizza, I dont like hamburgers. A few lessons later they
encountered the question Do you like. . .? but this time it was used, not
with food, but with the names of their friends, e.g. Do you like Yong-
Hee? The children were horried by this question, having associated the
idea of liking with food and eating.
The example helps us to understand how children see the foreign
language from the inside and try to nd meaning in how the language
is used in action, in interaction, and with intention, rather than from the
outside, as system and form. As a result, even if the syllabus they are
taught is structural, childrens learning will be communicative, in the
most basic sense of communicative, as being used with meaning and
for action. Conversely, if teaching or materials do not enable children to
nd meaning in new language, learning will be stultied. Good YL
teaching will provide opportunities for children to construct meaning in
the language they encounter by incorporating it in purposeful action and
Challenges from the expansion in teaching children 107
interaction. As children move through their primary years, they become
more able to work with abstract concepts and thus to take an outside
stance to the language, and work with it as decontextualized and as an
object of study. While working within the capabilities of children,
language teaching can also contribute to the development of abstract
thinking.
Reliance on oral The statement that foreign language learning by children relies more on
language oral language than is required of secondary language learning may seem
obvious, but it has profound implications. I have written at greater length
elsewhere about the development of literacy skills in English (Cameron
2001). The main point to make here is that it takes time for reading and
writing to reach a level at which they can support foreign language
learning. Before that point is reached, there is what we might call a
literacy skills lag, in which the written form of English creates such high
cognitive and motor skill demands for pupils that the oral component of
a task may have to be backgrounded to cope with the written demands.
For example, if asked to copy down new words from the board, it may
take young learners a long time to physically make the shapes of the
letters. In the arduous process of making shapes on paper, there is no
mental space left to think about meaning or use. Children learning to
read who are confronted with written instructions to a task have a huge
decoding and sense-making job to do before they can begin to work on
the task itself. Careful analysis of activities by teachers is necessary to
ensure that language learning opportunities are not overwhelmed by
literacy demands.
Learning to read and write in English is not straightforward or natural for
children. The links between written and spoken forms have developed
over many centuries, and as a result are complicated and often counter-
intuitive. The time and eort needed to master literacy in English are
indicated by the recent introduction of a Literacy Hour into schools in
England. This is an hour every day of directed literacy skills teaching,
throughout their primary years and into secondary. It is accepted, too, in
rst language situations, that while nearly all children can learn to speak
English, not all children will nd it easy to read and write English, and
will require remedial teaching. Remedial teaching of written English as a
foreign language is not much talked about, but we can expect to see the
need for it increasing with younger starting ages.
I am not arguing for prohibiting, or even delaying, the teaching of
written English, but rather that literacy teaching needs to be sensitive to
the development of rst language literacy, to the dierences between rst
language and English in the relationship between spoken and written
forms, and to the learners knowledge of spoken English. Once literacy
skills in English are suciently developed and automatized, they can
support language learning, but before that, i.e. probably before around
9 years of age at the earliest, these skills are themselves in the process of
being learnt, and should not be taken for granted as available for
supporting oral skills. It follows that in YL classrooms talk is (or should
be) the main medium of learning and teaching, including the learning of
literacy. Children encounter English through talk and practise English
108 Lynne Cameron
through talk, and literacy skills can be developed through talk, for
example by using rhymes and stories as entry points to written English.
The other side of this coin is that children are well-equipped to rely on
oral language; after all, this is what they have been doing since birth.
They will hear dierences in the spoken language that older learners will
nd less noticeable, and they will (generally) have a go at speaking the
foreign language with fewer inhibitions than older learners.
Having summarized what I consider to be two key features of childrens
language learning, I now proceed to unpack some of the implications.
Describing language The reliance on oral language in TEYL leads to a need to adjust how we
in TEYL think about language as the content of lessons and of learning, and as
what we aim to assess. For TEYL we need something other than the
4 skills + grammar, vocabulary, and phonology model that has been the
currency of ELT for many years. Figure 1 shows my suggested
alternative.

The model may help thinking about teaching, assessment,

and evaluation in TEYL.
The rst division separates skills in written English from oral skills, as
already argued for above. I then argue that oral skills can best be thought
of as discourse and vocabulary, with both of these being constructs
centred on use and meaning, to reect childrens learning. Discourse is
language as use, and often, but not always, occurs in stretches longer
than the sentence. The ability to understand, recall, and produce songs,
rhymes, chants, and stories, found in most YL courses, are all examples
of discourse skills. In contrast to these extended stretches of talk,
conversational skills involve understanding and using phrases and
sentences in interaction with other children and with adults. Vocabulary
skills involve the understanding and productive use not just of single
words, but of phrases and chunks of language.
The dotted lines to grammar represent the emergence of a sense of the
patterns and regularities of English that a child can develop through
work with discourse and vocabulary. This internal, informal, grammar
diers from the formalized, external, grammar found in pedagogic
grammars, which is largely unsuited to children under about 9 or 10
years of age. Grammar learning does take place in YL classrooms, and, at
the later stages, it can become more formal, and introduce
metalanguage. However, it is important that any model of language
includes a place for grammar as the informal building up of language
Challenges from the expansion in teaching children 109
figure 1
A model of the construct
language for child
foreign language learning
knowledge in childrens minds, since this is an important resource for
secondary teaching.
TEYL exit skills As I suggested earlier, it is vital that secondary teachers receive
and knowledge information about the young learners who come to them from the
primary sector, so that they can build on early language learning in
eective and motivating ways. Measures of exit language skills,
knowledge, and attitudes, are also needed for continuing evaluation of YL
programmes. However, we also need to think carefully about how
childrens language learning achievements are to be assessed. Although
teaching may have followed a syllabus, each childs learning will depend
on the meaning they have been able to construct in classroom activities
and language use. Because experiences in the language classroom are
constructed individually, we cannot easily predict what is learnt from
what is taught. It is clear that, by the end of primary school, any class of
children will vary quite widely in what they have learnt of English.
Increasing globalization and encounters with English through
information technology will further increase the variation in language
skills across individuals.
Assessment portfolios for children seem to oer possibilities, since they
bring together a collection of the childs produced work, results of small-
scale assessments, and self-assessments. However, the portfolio as used
in primary schools in the USA and the UK is largely a written document,
and the reliance on oral language in TEYL requires a mode of assessment
that allows for samples of spoken English to be included, and that
records achievements with reading and writing separately from oral
skills development. In some contexts, CD-ROM portfolios may be a way
forward, since they can include samples of talk as well as scanned-in
written work, and oer the chance to use video. The model of language
above would suggest that such a portfolio would include oral skills
evidence, such as samples of extended talk that the child produces or
responds to, samples of conversational interaction recorded by pairs of
children, and vocabulary testing activities such as thematic pictures to
name. Alternative measures of development in oral skills are needed for
TEYL contexts where access to ICT is not universal.
Building on TEYL The secondary teacher will increasingly be confronted with the dual, and
at secondary level interrelated, challenges of motivating pupils over longer periods of
learning and of building on very varied levels of skills with oral and
written English. It will be less appropriate to work with a single
coursebook, since it is unlikely that this would be able to address the
varied learning needs of pupils. Solutions include the use of
dierentiated tasks, provision of remedial literacy skills teaching,
increasing learner autonomy, and, more drastically, adopting a dierent
approach altogether. The switch to secondary school oers a chance to
address the challenge of motivation through a change of approach to
language teaching and learning. The model of language in Figure 1 can
evolve in two major ways as pupils move to secondary level. Firstly, in a
reverse of the direction at primary level, written language can support
oral language development. As literacy skills become well established,
110 Lynne Cameron
written texts of all types, whether paper or on computer, oer a valuable
source of new vocabulary and of written and spoken discourse activities
around texts. Secondly, the nature and position of grammar in learning
can change. The cognitive maturity of secondary learners can be
exploited to take the inside learning of language at primary level and use
it to consider the language from the outside. The discourse and
vocabulary learnt at primary level can be used as a resource for exploring
English in a more foregrounded and systematic way at secondary level.
Using ideas from language awareness (e.g. Kowal and Swain 1994),
teachers can help pupils map out and label the English they already
know, while, in the process, pupils can ll in gaps in their spoken
English. In such work, the mixed levels in a class become a resource
rather than a problem. A more adult approach to language learning will
give pupils a chance to learn in new ways, and may also address the
challenge of maintaining motivation.
New topics and themes are also vital at this stage. If learning as a child
has not been entirely successful or enjoyable, pupils need a chance to
start afresh without having to revisit beginner topics like names,
families, and hobbies.
Teacher education Amongst other knowledge and skills, teachers of young learners need:
for TEYL
an understanding of how children think and learn
skills and knowledge in spoken English to conduct whole lessons orally,
and to pick up childrens interests and use them for language teaching
to be equipped to teach initial literacy in English.
It is not easy to teach children eectively, and the reliance on oral
language means that teaching children a foreign language may, in some
ways, be more demanding at primary level than at higher levels. If
children are to be kept attentive and mentally active, the teacher must be
alert and adaptive to their responses to tasks, adjusting activities and
exploiting language learning opportunities that arise on the spot. This
requires a high level of uency and a wide knowledge of vocabulary.
Furthermore, since children reproduce the accent of their teachers with
deadly accuracy, pronunciation skills are also vitally important at the
early stages.
Demanding the highest levels of spoken English for teachers of the
youngest learners goes against much policy and popular assumptions
about teaching children. How this challenge is met will vary from country
to country. The Ministry of Education in Oman, for example, is
collaborating with my department to carry out a massive programme of
upgrading primary English teachers to degree level. Where the resources to
undertake such retraining are not available, it would seem important for
policy makers to be realistic about what can be achieved at primary level. It
may be more ecient to start teaching English at a later stage, but to do so
with teachers who have the language skills and training to enthuse pupils.
The worst scenario of all will be that an expansion of TEYL leads to more
pupils who are disenchanted with learning a foreign language.
Final version received February 2002
Challenges from the expansion in teaching children 111
Notes
1 I use the terms primary as a shorthand
convenience to refer to the stage of schooling
from 5 or 6 years of age to 11 or 12 years of age,
and secondary for the stage from 11 or 12 years
upwards. I am aware that some systems have
three stages, and/or dierent labels for the
stages.
2 The written side of the gure is not set out in
detail here.
References
Cameron, L. 2001. Teaching Languages to Young
Learners. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Donaldson, M. 1978. Childrens Minds. London:
Fontana.
Kowal, M. and M. Swain. 1994. Using
collaborative language production tasks to
promote students language awareness. Language
Awareness 3/2: 7393.
Moon, J. and M. Nikolov (eds.). 2000. Research into
Teaching English to Young Learners. Pcs, Hungary:
University of Pcs Press.
Nikolov, M. 2000. Issues in Research into Early
Foreign Language Programmes in J. Moon and
M. Nikolov (eds.).
Rixon, S. 2000. Collecting Eagles Eye Data on the
Teaching of English to Young Learners: The
British Council Overview in J. Moon and M.
Nikolov (eds.).
The author
Lynne Cameron is Senior Lecturer in the School of
Education, University of Leeds, where she teaches
courses on Young Learners and Language Study
for TESOL. Her research interests include
childrens understanding of metaphor, and the
learning of English as an additional language. Her
book, Teaching Languages to Young Learners,
published by Cambridge University Press,
develops a practical theorization of teaching
English at primary level.
Email: L.J.Cameron@education.leeds.ac.uk
112 Lynne Cameron