Performative Language Teaching in Early Education

Language Learning through Drama and the Arts for Children 3–7

Joe Winston

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350199156
• eBook ISBN: 9781350199170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica per la prima infanzia

This book introduces the application of drama and arts-related activities to the teaching of English as a second or additional language in early education. Joe Winston draws on both his own scholarly expertise and experience as a practitioner to provide a theoretical rationale, practical examples, tips and easy-to-read teaching guides intended to help busy professionals apply drama related methods in an efficient and accessible way. Detailed examples of schemes of work are included for all year groups and developmental stages between the ages of 3 and 7 years of age. Each scheme centres on a popular and easily obtainable picturebook or children's story. Detailed guidance on how to plan and structure lessons with specific learning objectives is offered, as is extensive advice on issues of classroom management. The practical approaches have been used successfully in early years settings in China and primary and pre-primary settings in the UK, and are adaptable to a variety of national and cultural contexts.

CHAPTER ONE Young Children Learning English as a Foreign Language

A Growing Global Trend

The widespread provision of ECEC has increased internationally over recent years as, globally, more and more women join the workforce and education continues to be seen as key to prosperity. In 2019, for example, 87 per cent of 3- to 5-year-olds in forty-two OECD countries were enrolled in pre-primary education in establishments that met internationally recognized standards, which include an adequate level of intentional educational properties; at least two hours of educational activities each day; a relevant and recognized curriculum; and trained or accredited staff.¹

As this overall provision of ECEC has been growing, so too has the teaching of EFL in pre-primary and early primary settings. While English is currently only the fourth most spoken language in the world by native speakers (after Mandarin Chinese, Hindi and Spanish), when non-native speakers are included, it has over 1,500 million speakers, far more than any other language.² Effectively, English has become the language of globalization, and this has sparked a trend to teach it at ever earlier ages, driven not only by governmental policy decisions but also by parental pressure as it is seen as the main international language of trade, commerce and culture. In the words of Shelagh Rixon, ‘Increasing the grasp within a nation of a politically and economically important subject such as English sounds to many politicians and their public to be an uncontroversially desirable proposition.’³ As countries become more international in their outlook, being competent in English is seen as increasingly important in furthering business and commercial opportunities in the eyes of politicians, and in promising opportunities for their children to study abroad and attain better job prospects in the eyes of many parents. In East Asia, the urge parents have shown in recent years for their children to learn English from a very young age has become so notable that words such as ‘craze’, ‘frenzy’ and ‘fever’ have been used to describe it.⁴

Another undeniable factor impacting on the numbers of very young EFL learners has emanated from the increasing flow across borders of migrants and international refugees. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) estimated the number of migrants globally at 272 million in 2019, up 40 million over the previous six-year period. Many arrive from non-English speaking countries to those where English is the language of instruction. For example, 58.6 million of this total is located in North America.⁵

In China, English was introduced in cities and suburban areas as a compulsory subject from the age of 6 upwards in 2001 and rolled out into rural areas a year later.⁶ For many native English speakers, 6 would seem to be a very young age to begin to learn a foreign language, but in China, Japan and South Korea, for many ambitious parents, it is not seen as early enough. Consequently, the provision of English teaching in kindergarten classes for children between the ages of 3 and 6 has become increasingly common in urban areas and is now seen as a feature of overall first-rate educational provision.⁷ This reflects not only the perception of the high stakes of English learning but also a commonly held belief that, indeed, the earlier one starts to learn a foreign language, the easier it is and the more competent one will become in its use. And the phenomenon is not simply noticeable in East Asia. In research conducted in 2012, which involved 2,500 kindergarten teachers in forty-nine non-English speaking countries, over half of the respondents stated that children began to learn English at the age of 6 or earlier.⁸

The social and cultural pressures that young migrant children face while attempting to learn English will, of course, be very different from those faced by the relatively privileged children whose parents are pushing them to learn English, but one fundamental question remains the same: when learning a foreign language, is starting younger a benefit in and of itself?

English for Young Learners: Does ‘Younger’ Equate with ‘Better’?

‘Everyone knows that with languages the earlier you start, the easier they are.’⁹ This statement from 1999, by the then UK prime minister Tony Blair, reflects a generally held ‘common-sense’ view based on the ease with which children appear naturally to acquire remarkable competence in their first language compared with the difficulty many older children and adults seem to face when trying to learn a second. This assumption has driven both parental pressure and policy decision-making in East Asia and has received theoretical support through the concept of a ‘critical period hypothesis’ (CPH), first developed in 1967 by Lenneberg. He proposed that the crucial age for picking up and processing a new language lies between the ages of 2 and 12, after which the human brain finds it more difficult.¹⁰ Subsequent proponents of CPH narrowed its boundaries by suggesting that the age of onset (AO) begins at birth, with the offset at around the ages of 5 or 6 years. Still more studies, focused on the neurology of the brain, have proposed that the optimal period is later, from 6 to pre-puberty, due to the ‘furious growth’ in the language area of the brain that characterizes these years.¹¹ Rather than argue about the existence or otherwise of rigidly determined, onset and offset boundaries, other educators have come to prefer the idea of a ‘sensitive’ rather than a ‘critical’ period of acquisition, whose age-related boundaries are more fluid.¹² This theory still suggests that the young brain is hardwired to facilitate second language acquisition in ways that become less effective after the child reaches maturity.

However, more recently, Singleton and Pfenninger have questioned the validity of theories that stress ‘hard-wired’ maturation as the major determinant to learning a foreign language successfully. They point to numerous examples of research worldwide that show how many students who start at secondary school level perform equally as well as those who start much earlier, commenting that ‘there is much more to age than maturation, and that age-related social, psychological and contextual factors may play as significant a role as maturational factors’.¹³ Referring to a range of research projects, they conclude:

in an educational context, age of onset (AO) has been found to interact with school effects or treatment variables (e.g. type of instruction) as well as micro-contextual variables such as classroom and clustering effects.¹⁴

In other words, although young children may well have a propensity for acquiring language, their learning environment, social skills and how well they are taught can be of equal significance.

A recent example that illustrates this can be seen in a study that focused on minority language speaking children in Australian preschool settings. Here, Oliver and Nguyen support the concept of a sensitive period of language acquisition, observing that younger learners can learn grammatical rules intuitively given the right kind of exposure to the target language.¹⁵ But they also point to features in children’s interactions with one another, such as the way they will play with and repeat language patterns in their talk, particularly when working on content-specific tasks together, as key features in the effectiveness of their learning of a new language. This kind of group interactivity and social learning they see as particularly advantageous to preschool learners. They emphasize the importance of social interaction, of using the language for meaningful communication and of specific contexts for learning that make it enjoyable as well as meaningful, such as learning through play in structured classroom settings.

We might reasonably postulate that any learning in an educational setting, linguistic or otherwise, will result from a combination of innate and social influences, supported by structured opportunities for language use; and this would appear to be reflected internationally in the ways most ECEC settings are organized. Here, Murao has pointed to the two philosophical traditions at either end of a continuum, the one showing a teacher-led focus on preparing children for ‘school-readiness skills’ such as literacy and numeracy, the other more child-centred, emphasizing broad educational goals learned through play and interactivity with adults and peers. If the former emphasizes the attainment of cognitive skills, the latter encourages the child’s social and cognitive well-being. She then makes the important point that, in practice, most fall somewhere between the two extremes.¹⁶ This is certainly the case with settings such as MEIYI RKEC, in which teacher-led activities and structured, interactive play characterize the progression of the school day.

Second Language Learning in the Early Years of Education: A Cognitive and Social Process

Patton O. Tabors is a Harvard scholar who has conducted long-term research with minority language learners in a pre-primary setting in the United States, all of whom were recent arrivals in the country.¹⁷ In her account she provides clear and detailed examples of such learning in action. In doing so, she emphasizes the need for these children to receive the kind of support that will help them become socially effective communicators. Indeed, her study suggests that communicative competence and social competence are so closely related as to be of equal importance in a child’s learning a new language and she looks in detail not only at those outgoing, confident children who make the kind of rapid progress in communicating in a target language that commentators such as Tony Blair have been so impressed by, but also attends to those children who are much slower to do so. Her study points to the need for teachers to embrace the twin aims of cultivating a willingness in the child to take risks with the target language and of helping them become motivated to want to learn it. Exposure to the target language may not be sufficient in and of itself; and this, I would argue, is applicable to majority language children learning English in immersive environments such as RKEC as well as for minority language children in English speaking countries. The teacher’s job of care, Tabors emphasizes, is to help all her children achieve their potential while recognizing that there will always be differences in their levels of attainment; and this is, of course, true of all teachers in all settings.

We have seen so far, then, that the rapid spread of ECEC, and EFL as part of that p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Chapter One Young Children Learning English as a Foreign Language
• Chapter Two Performative Language Teaching in the Early Years: Key Concepts
• Chapter Three Performative Strategies for Teaching English to Young Learners
• Chapter Four Schemes of Learning: 3- to 5-Year-Olds
• Chapter Five Schemes of Learning: 5- to 7-Year-Olds
• Chapter Six Performative Language Teaching and Assessment for Learning
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright Page