Innovative trends in teaching the young

Abstract

When discussing innovative trends in language teaching in the context of the nowadays’ changing social and educational context, one must also take into consideration the titans of learning theories, the psychology studies, the research on motivation and try to understand, drawing on these, what makes a student ‘tick’ when it comes to learning. This paper aims at presenting the work of several important researchers in the field of learning theories, whose ideas have shaped the educational world and have shown what teachers could do to help their students and what learners themselves may try in order to motivate themselves. These theories apply either exclusively to language learning or to learning in general and can be adapted to language acquisition.