Learning to Learn English , which she co-authored, was one of the first books to apply new knowledge about how we learn to the classroom, and she has recently worked on Wordflo , the language learner's personal organiser from Longman . In this interview Gail shares her thoughts on teaching young learners, and gives some guidelines to help make lessons more enjoyable and productive for the teachers and the children. Children are learning so many things at the same time and still developing conceptually, so teachers need to be aware of the conceptual level of their pupils. It also helps to have some knowledge of the kinds of things children are learning in the primary curriculum and of the approach to education or learning in the mother tongue.
Children also have much shorter concentration spans and get bored easily.
The teacher has to work very hard to keep their attention throughout a lesson and make sure she makes things interesting and fun. A child will soon let the teacher know if they are bored or find the lesson uninteresting by becoming disruptive. The approach has to be different. You need lessons which are full of meaningful and purposeful activities within clear familiar contexts. Activities also need to have outcomes which are not just linguistic, for example, listen and colour or listen and draw, making something, listen and carry out actions.