Collins Introducing English to Young Children: Spoken Language

Opal Dunn

• Publisher: Collins
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780007556823
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Langue anglaise

A practical teacher guide book for teaching spoken English to young children

1

Very young and young children and language learning

1.1 Children’s and parents’ expectations

1.2 Starting to learn English as another language

1.3 The developing child

1.4 How a child learns oral English

1.5 Adults’ and parents’ roles in learning English

1.1 Children’s and parents’ expectations

We become interested in what we are good at, to quote Bruner (Donaldson 1978). This simple truth about attitudes also applies to learning English. How often adults say, ‘I like English. I was good at it’, or conversely when excusing their poor English add, ‘I was never any good at it at school’.

At no other time in life does the human being display such enthusiasm for learning, for living, for finding out (Pluckrose 1979). Very young and young children normally have an inner drive to learn. They are natural language acquirers; they are self-motivated to pick up language without conscious learning, unlike many adolescents and adults. They have their own language learning skills and strategies, which develop as their brain develops and they grow physically (their skull making an effective sound box and their vocal chords and mouth forming the shapes necessary to make sounds). In the womb they hear and are listening to voices. From their first cries, children respond to their mother’s soothing words in what is to become their mother tongue.

Young children seem to be ‘tuned in’ to listen to language, absorb it and then use it through social interaction with supportive others to find out about the world. Their energy to ask, enquire and make sense of their world is remarkable. Parents often feel exhausted by their child’s continual drive to find out: Why? What’s this? What for? How?

Learning is both social and conceptual for a young child. In making sense of every new experience, young children have to make sense of what the other person is saying and doing, confirming the known, whilst stretching and adjusting their own internal categories and theories to take in the new. They become skilled in understanding other people’s language and abstracting meaning from it. Young children are quick to decode facial language and can rapidly sense when an adult is not pleased with them.

Language and learning are social and interdependent. Thinking cannot take place without language. Vygotsky (1978) explained that Language is the tool of thought. External speech is the process of turning thoughts into words.

We know from observing very young children that even very little language enables participation in a social world and the sharing of meaning: Gone. Stopit. Myturn. Through natural, ‘tuned-in’ supportive dialogue with an adult or more skilled older person, grammar and vocabulary is absorbed and conceptual progress may take place without any planned instruction or conscious teaching by the older person.

Babies learn much through observing carefully and then imitating the role model: the adult or older child. Steiner’s work emphasises the great importance of imitation and the quality of the role model. Sometimes young children pick up inappropriate language from other children, which, although it might be annoying, is a measure of their ability to learn through imitation.

From an early age young children have an innate ability to imitate pronunciation and work out the rules of language for themselves. By the age of 6 years, many are capable of adjusting their accent in English to match the local dialect of their playmates, speaking two Englishes, classroom English and playground English, they rarely confuse when to use which type of English, so teachers and parents are often unaware that they also speak playground English. Some young children can speak a little of four or five languages and enjoy opportunities to boast about their language tally. ‘I can speak Czech, and I can speak French and I can speak English’ a 5-year-old boasted to other children in the playground. Any idea that learning to talk in English is difficult does not occur to them unless suggested by adults, who themselves may have struggled to learn English ‘academically’ through grammar-based textbooks at secondary school level. Many adults, who picked up English young, say they cannot remember how, or sometimes, even when, they learned it. ‘We just played, said rhymes like “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall” and sang songs.’

It is now generally accepted that lifelong attitudes are formed in early childhood and usually before the age of 8 or 9 years. If teachers can engage young children and capture and keep their enthusiasm by presenting well-planned language experiences, right for their needs and development level, children usually make progress and feel they are ‘good at English’. The best motivation to learn a language is not an abstract liking of its beauty or utility, but a liking for the person who speaks it (Taeschner 2005). It is in these early stages of learning English that the foundations for what may be a lifelong interest in English language, literacy and culture are laid down.

1.1.1 Children’s expectations

Children come to English sessions or lessons with expectations about what they are going to do and achieve. These expectations are influenced by what their family, friends and society in general expect and what the learners have heard from other children. Today’s children may already have heard English spoken on screens and even visited English-speaking countries and seen or spoken to English-speaking children. Technology now brings different languages into the home through TV, DVD, websites, YouTube, Skype, and handheld devices, so children may have many different ideas about English and global English-based cultures. Children like to be entertained and are skilled in picking up audio-visual language and cultural information from the screen. Culture accompanies most English language activities, providing they are not word-for-word direct translations, and young children are especially skilled at picking up information from visual images (see 7.5).

Young children have an inner drive to achieve and when they independently achieve something to what they know to be a high standard it provides an inner, deep self-satisfaction that is important in character development, emotional well-being and in forming lifelong positive attitudes. In today’s fast moving lifestyle, many children may not have achieved any one task well enough to feel this inner glow of satisfaction. However, through English oral play and repeated chanting of English oral play, rhymes and tongue-twisters in pleasurable situations, many appear to feel the satisfaction that comes through achievement (see Chapter 6).

1.1.2 Home languages

Monolingual and monocultural children (those who only know one language and culture) appear to find learning English a different challenge from children from binational families, where parents speak their own language to their child at home and their children grow up speaking two languages (bilingual), one of which is usually dominant, as it is the most used. Children who have learned two languages consecutively (L2 introduced after L1) already know how to acquire and communicate in a second language before they go to school. Some of these children may learn English as L4 as they speak two languages at home: school language (SL) is L3 and English L4. Normal young children can cope with acquiring four oral languages if the learning situations are activity-based, right for the child, and within the family’s expectations. Amazingly, children who learn English as L3 or L4 generally learn more easily than monolingual children for whom English is L2, as these children have already worked out how to use their own personal language learning skills and strategies to acquire another new language.

It seems that to acquire L2 non-consecutively after L1 (home language or mother tongue) – that is after a gap – is the most difficult way, as a young child has to work out their own language acquisition strategies and skills in order to pick up the new language (although this might also depend on the age at which L2 is learned).

Most children who learn English as L2 at about 7 or 8 years already know to use the main structures of their L1, although they are still using limited language learning skills and strategies to learn vocabulary. Starting to learn a new language, English as L2, means that these children have to work out which of their personal language acquisition skills they can reuse to pick up English successfully. Once they have reused their learning strategies and skills to acquire L2, it seems that L3, and any other subsequent languages, can be learned in the same way, albeit more easily. This is, of course, a generalisation, because learning language depends on the ‘feel-good’ factor. If the relationship between the adult, who is the mediator of the new language, and the child is not good, learning can be difficult and even frustrating. People who acquire a second language or languages before puberty appear to retain the skill to pick up languages orally throughout their life. In fact some teenagers, who have learned L2 young, complain about using language textbooks at secondary school, saying that they need to hear a language spoken before they can learn grammar rules.

1.1.3 Immediate results

Children are creatures of the moment. They work best and most successfully when the objectives are clear, comprehensible, immediate (Pluckrose 1979). Objectives and language are clearer where activities and the accompanying language are structured to fit them. This enables children to focus more easily on a task without having to sift through all the content in order to find the information and language to be learned. This is an economy in learning energy and time, as young children’s concentration span is short.

Young children want to please; they care about what others think about them, especially their loved ones and their teacher with whom they generally have a special, emotional, family-like relationship, sometimes referred to as ‘professional love’. In the Nursery School more than at any other stage of education, a great emphasis is placed on the teacher-child relationship and thereby on good communication – a communicative/emotional relationship between adult and child (Taeschner 2005).

Children long to ‘show off’ a new English ‘talking’ (speaking) skill. From an early age, they work out that a new L1 verbal skill is rewarded by some form of praise from adult admirers! They remember how excited their parents were when they recited a complete nursery rhyme by themselves.

Children want immediate results. They expect to go home after the first lesson able to speak some English, even if it is just a rhyme or counting in English, so they can ‘show off’ and win praise from their extended family and friends. Success motivates; any praise given by parents and other adults, whose approval and love children seek, stimulates, especially in the first stages of learning English, when the child is still gaining confidence. Rhymes provide good ‘show off’ pieces and at the same time satisfy children’s desire ‘to talk a lot of English quickly, just like grown-ups’ they may have seen and heard on screen (see 6.2). It is through parents’ praise that children find out that they are doing the right thing and understand what is expected of them.

Children are used to communicating in L1 and, as soon as possible, they want to do the same in English. They know that it is through talk that they can communicate and exchange ideas with others. However, they expect to use English in real, meaningful experiences. If children are already reading and writing in L1, they expect to be shepherded to do the same in English. Although preschool children are happy with the same all-oral approach they have in L1, to spend months only speaking English is not ‘real school work’ to young children who can read and write in SL. Introducing English to Young Children: Reading and Writing (Dunn forthcoming) explains how reading and writing can be introduced through meaningful, holistic activities from the beginning stages of acquiring oral language.

If children’s expectations are not fulfilled and they do not get what they have expected from the English lessons, they can lose interest. Loss of interest sometimes occurs once the novelty of the English lesson fades and the children find they can still say very little in English. With careful planning and working together with the family, this can be avoided. Once a child has lost interest, it takes time, and focused effort and encouragement, to re-stimulate interest.

1.1.4 Parents’ expectations

For children to ‘feel good’ and for learning to be successful, parents’ expectations should, as nearly as possible, coincide with those of the teacher. Where parents become disappointed with their child’s progress and critical of the teacher’s methods, the child becomes confused, which reflects on their learning. It is important that before starting to learn English, parents understand how children learn and how the teacher teaches. Programmes also need to be explained and efforts made to keep families positive by askin...