Teaching pre-school English
By Alex Case
Should my English teaching school be a pre-school school?
(Or should my pre-school be an English teaching school?)
You only have to look at the amount of new materials being launched by the major EFL publishers for the pre-school English teaching market (see, for example, references 1, 2 and 3) to see that 2 to 7 year olds is tipped as a growth market in the near future. This is hardly limited to English teaching, either, when amazon.com has 750 different educational DVDs and videos available for the under twos. So as someone in the English teaching industry, how should you feel about this wave of very small students descending upon an English language classroom near you? Should you dread toilet troubles in the classroom, jump on the bandwagon, change your teachers, change their training or dismiss the whole idea of teaching such students as a delusion resulting from an increasingly competitive market and increasingly competitive parents? Below I will examine the consequences of playschool and kindergarten age kids learning English in our schools for all the people involved: the teachers, parents, students, school managers, school owners etc. Even for those who are not directly touched by this trend, I believe there are things we can all learn from this change in the English teaching world.
Why are you here?
As a teacher who specialises very generally in ‘outside contracts’ I have come to have two seemingly diverse specialisations- classes in businesses and classes in kindergartens. That mixed experience makes me automatically want to look at a new kindergarten class in the same way as I would look at a new business class and do a ‘needs analysis’. This is obviously not straight-forward for the under sevens, as any of the few kids who might have a present or future need for English are unlikely to be able to articulate it or even understand that need in any language. However, understanding why those pre-school children are learning English is maybe the best starting point to being able to pick a syllabus and teaching methods suitable for this age range. Although we might have our own views on if and how such young children can learn English well and the children themselves will certainly have reasons why they will ask their parents to continue going to a class or refuse to go again, it is ultimately the parents who provide the impetus for trying a new language class and continue to pay for it every month.
Education mothers?
One common motivation for starting children in pre-school classes it that it will give them a head start in language learning and their academic careers more generally. There is a commonly held perception that the younger you start a language the easier it will be to learn, especially in terms of picking up listening skills and a native-like accent. This effect can certainly be seen when a family moves to an English speaking country and the children are quite happily mixing with their peers in English while the parents are still struggling with learning the alphabet or pronouncing their maid’s name. Indeed, “there seems to be some agreement [by researchers] that there is a sensitive period for acquiring a second language. Children who start younger than 11-12 years of age, given advantageous learning circumstances such as plenty of input and interaction in an English environment are more likely to acquire English to native levels without an accent” {4} This academic data seems to have trickled down over the years to the general public, perhaps because it seems to match their own everyday experience. There are several major caveats to this data that seem to get little coverage outside the specialist press, though. One is a debate on whether these children are actually learning the language quicker than the parents in this situation. The fact that they learn enough to cope in their everyday life more quickly might just be a result of the limited amount of language they need, compared to an adult who needs to learn vocabulary and formality levels for many different social situations. More importantly for most EFL learners is the question of whether whatever language learning advantages young learners have can be reproduced outside of the circumstances of ex-pat kids, namely intensive exposure to the language they are learning and a real need to pick up the language to interactive socially with the people around them everyday. If that isn’t possible, the question then becomes whether those circumstances can be reproduced outside the English speaking world. These questions will be dealt with below, but at this ‘needs analysis’ stage the important point to bear in mind is that some parents will expect their children to be able to pick the language up quickly because of their age, and will often want work on pronunciation and listening comprehension with a native-speaker. In my experience, the reasons why parents pull their children out of pre-school English classes or do not sign up after a demonstration lesson is that they think the classes are too easy and therefore their children will not progress quickly enough. The fact that we have to match the parents’ expectations or seek to change them if we want to even continue teaching those kids is one reason why the parents get first mention in this article.
The second major reason parents of pre-school age children state for coming to the schools I work for is for their children to learn to mix with other people. In Japan, children sometimes start English lessons before they have even started kindergarten or any other situation in which they mix with large groups of unknown people. One reason that parents choose language lessons for this first experience is that language is by definition a social and interactive skill and therefore suitable for a class where students will also learn to mix with others, share, wait their turn, use polite language etc. In Japan, a more specific social skill they say they want their children to pick up is to mix with foreigners without the nervousness that many adults and teenagers feel when faced with someone of a different culture and background. In my experience, there is also often an unspoken motivation connected to social mixing, in that working on language learning and using language learning materials at home, e.g. reading an English bedtime story or listing things in English as children pass them in the street, can help the interaction between parents and children at a time when people in many developed countries are losing the ability to interact without any clear short term benefit or goal. Again, if we want the parents to be happy we will need to provide training in social skills like saying thank you, as well as language they can recycle with their children in their daily lives or language learning materials at home.
To read the rest of article, please visit: http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/articles/kids/teaching-pre-school-english/
Alex Case has been a teacher, teacher trainer, Director of Studies, ELT writer and editor in Turkey, Thailand, Spain, Greece, Italy, Japan, UK and now Korea, and writes TEFLtastic blog (www.tefl.net/alexcase)
* ELTWeelkly would like to thank Alex Case for contributing this article.
Nice one, Alex! I see you’re putting yourself about big-time these days, eh?!