Teaching Writing and Reading to young learners

 Teaching Writing and Reading to young learners

    The successful student in learning English stems from English teacher competencies in designing classroom activities and in implementing an appropriate strategy in teaching English. Moreover, students in the growth period need the right strategy to acquire and to habitual language. The strategy which is used in the teaching and learning process is very important because it can help students to participate actively in the classroom and become self-directed.

    Young learners of English, as a foreign language, are exposed from their early years of learning to read and write in English through the textbooks they use. Concerning the students’  reading skills,  the texts in the coursebook are not authentic.  As far as writing skills are concerned, students usually must read a model text and produce a similar piece of written language without having a real audience and purpose in mind

    Reading is one of the receptive skills in English. Receptive skills are the ways in which people extract meaning from the discourse they see or hear (Harmer, 2007:199). Reading is attended as the primary source of comprehensible input. According to Ahmadi Gilakjani et.al (2012), as cited by (Najva, 2015:1344), we considered reading is an interactive process mediated between the reader and the text. The fundamental concept is that the reader reorganizes the available information in the text not only based on the knowledge achieved from the text but also from the prior knowledge of the reader. The age of students is a major factor in making a decision about how and what to teach. People of different ages have different needs, competencies, and cognitive skills. As a teacher, we might children of primary age to acquire more a foreign language through play, for example, whereas for adults we can reasonably expect greater use of abstract thought (Harmer, 2007:37). It means that students from different levels need different strategies in their learning. According to Brown (2001:87), there are five categories may help give some practical approaches to teaching children; intellectual development, attention span, sensory input, affective factors, and authentic; meaningful language. Children are generally less able to give selective and prolonged attention to features of learning tasks than adults and are more easily diverted and distracted by other people (Cameron, 2001:15). Children still need help and guidance from other people to understand things around them.

Reading is the reader’s struggle to understand what the text is about. In other words, it is a dialogue between the text and the reader (Hedge,  2000).  Reading serves specific purposes (Grabe and Stoller, 2002, p.6). For example

• Reading to find specific information. This is called scanning. Readers try to find out about a specific word or piece of information. 
• Reading to skim the text. This is done to get a general understanding of the text. 
• Reading to learn from texts. It occurs in an academic context where the reader has to memorize information and details. 
• Reading to integrate information. The reader decides on which information to use in order to write and critically analyze the contents.

Writing Skills

    Writing can be defined as the learners’  output when they have received sufficient input. It is considered perhaps the most difficult skill since it involves handwriting, spelling,  grammar, syntax, and the organization of paragraphs and ideas  (Ioannou  &  Pavlou,  2003).  There are three approaches to writing;  text-oriented,  writer-oriented, and reader-oriented.  To begin with, the text-oriented approach considers texts as autonomous objects in which writers express their intended meaning by following grammatical rules, focusing on form, product, and accuracy (Jones, 2006).  Next, the writer-oriented approach focuses on the writer; his/her creativity, cognitive processes, and context  (Flower and  Hayes,  1981).  Thinking before writing, the free expression of ideas, and the writer’s imagination are some of its features (Hyland, 2002). Finally, the reader-oriented approach views writing as social interaction and social construction. It became popular around the ‘80s and considers writing as a social process to construct knowledge and negotiate to mean.

    This is where technology comes in, and to be more specific, Computer Assisted Language  Learning.  Nowadays,  young learners are familiar with using the computer and the internet for various reasons,  such as playing computer games and finding information on the internet for school projects.