The Strategies of Communication

with Young Learners

3rd Meeting
Questions to discuss
1. What do you use as the language of
instruction in the English classroom, English
or Indonesian?
2. Give some reasons for your answer.
After the presentation
You are able to:
1. Explain the reasons why you use
L1 or L2.
2. Explain the supported theories
why you should use L2 .
3. Explain the strategies how to
communicate with the students.
CONTEXT FOR LEANING ENGLISH
Time
- How much time do the learners learn English?
Exposure
Where do the exposures come from?
A real need for English
Do the learners really need English for
communication outside the class?
Variety of input
What sources do the learners get the input?
(spoken and written sources)
COMMUNICATION
A. Reasons to Use English
1. Childrens Ability to Grasp Meaning
2. Childrens Creative Use of Limited Language
Resources
3. Childrens Capacity for Indirect Learning
1. Childrens Ability to
Grasp Meaning
Children have their strategy to
understand meaning before they
understand the meaning of the
individual words.
They understand meaning from:
intonation, gesture, facial expressions,
actions, and circumstances.
2. Childrens Creative Use of Limited
Language Resources
The urge to communicate makes young
learners find some ways of expressing
themselves.
The language demanded by the
activity is unpredictable and is not just
asking the children to repeat set
phrases, but is encouraging them to
construct language actively for
themselves.
3. Childrens Capacity for Indirect
Learning
Conscious direct learning seems
to encourage worked-out
accuracy.
Unconscious indirect learning, or
acquisition, encourages
spontaneous and therefore more
fluent use.
B. SLA THEORIES
1. Caretaker talk
2. Foreigner talk
3. Teacher talk


1. Caretaker talk
Caretaker talk is language used by caretakers when they talk to
children.
In caretaker-child communication, Ellis (2008: 211) concluded
that it is the interactional rather than the formal adjustments
of caretaker language that help to accelerate development.
An adult acts as an initiator of the interaction which fosters
development, or when the child initiates, he will act as a
facilitator of the development by giving acknowledgement,
clarification, expansion and so forth.
Similarly, a teacher in a classroom makes certain formal and
discourse adjustments to ensure understanding, while the
learner employs certain communication strategies to
overcome problems and to maximize existing resources.
Features of Caretaker talk
Caretaker talk is intelligible and grammatically
well formed.
Caretakers talk lots about the here-and-now.
Caretakers simplify sentences by using short
sentences.
Caretakers repeat a lot.
Those characteristics can be adopted by the
English teacher in elementary school to give
model and to make the students understand
the target language.
2. Foreigner Talk
Speech by native speakers to nonnative
speakers is modified in the same way as that
of caretaker speech.
Native speakers speech, or foreigner talk, is
employed with the focus on communication
rather than the teaching of the language itself.
Features of Foreigner Talk
Simple language (choice of words and
sentence structures)
A lot of repetitions
Clarification

3. Teacher Talk
The teacher language or teacher-talk.
The function: asking information, checking
the students answer, controlling the class,
prasing, providing examples of target
language, and checking the students
understanding. Moon (2000: 61)
Features of Teacher talk
a. Wong Fillmore (1985) in Ellis (2008: 796):
- avoindance of translation,
- an emphasis on communication and comprehension
by ensuring message redundancy,
- the avoidance of ungrammatical teacher-talk,
- the frequent use of types and routines,
- repetitiveness,
- tailoring questions to suit the learners level of
proviciency, and
- general richness of language.
Strategies of Teacher Talk
Chaudron (1988) proves that teachers employ
some modifications when they communicate
with their students: rate of speech appears to
be slower; pauses, which may be evidence of
the spaker planning more, are possibly more
frequent and longer; pronounciation tends to
be exaggerated and simplified; vocabulary use
is more basic; degree of subordination is
slower; more declaratives and statements are
used than questions, and teachers may self-
repeat more frequently.
C. The Strategies to Communicate with
Young Learners
1. Verbal Language
2. Non-verbal language

1. Verbal Language
The strategies employed by English teachers
using words. Some modifications:
a. Simple choice of words
b. Simple sentence structure
c. Repetitions
d. Using Code-mixing or L1


2. Non-verbal Language
Non-verbal strategies are tricks applied by the
teacher and the students when they
communicate in the classroom without using
words.
- facial expressions,
- gestures, and body movements,
- paralanguage (speed, loudness, intonation)
- using media or objects.