Teach English in Yangqiao Zhen - Anqing Shi

Teaching EFL in a KindergartenI actually decided to choose the subject ?Teaching EFL in a kindergarten? because finishing Unit 19 it made me realized that I wanted to teach english as a foreign language to young kids rather than adults. I also think it?s because I have a little boy of 4 years old and I see his progress every day in mastering three different languages. As written in Unit 19, children have a facility to absorb a language more easily than adults. Studies have also shown that children who have had exposure to a foreign language from a young age demonstrate problem-solving skills, more advanced reading skills and a greater grasp of their first language. They exhibit more confidence and greater flexibility in thinking. I believe that the younger they start learning a foreign language, the easier it is and the more likely they are to master a native accent. Immersing children in a foreign language environment lays the groundwork for fluency. Much has been written about the learning of a foreign language at an early age, at times people feeling enthusiastic, worried or deeply anguished about it. So how can we see clearly in the debate on teaching EFL in a kindergarten? Points are raised on the conditions necessary for the success of such teaching, on its advantages and its issues?.. The earlier the child is confronted to a foreign language, the better. At age three, children have the intellectual flexibility to imitate, to learn, to blend into the language and the culture of the foreign language. In kindergarten, the child learns the language by singing, playing, realizing objects effortlessly. This is an exceptional moment in which the child is available to store a lot of knowledge. He repeats the sounds he does not know in his own language without accent. He actually does it with pleasure. Of course, it is not enough to start learning the foreign language from the age of three. We must continue this learning throughout the primary education and further afield. I strongly believe that if we want the child to be truly bilingual, it would be necessary for schools to propose a mandatory language education system. The great advantage related to bilingual education at kindergarten, finely analyzed by C. Hagège (1996), is that the young child is capable of hearing and reproducing the same sounds in other languages unknown to him/her with regards to his/her mother tongue. A child by the time he is 10 would not be capable of doing this. It is important to note also that when a young child enters the world of a foreign language, he/she feels more confident and not inhibited by fear of his image like in pre-adolescence. If the child learns the foreign language very early through bilingual education, it has certain advantages intellectually. Numerous studies have suggested the existence of an advantage intellectually linked to the development of being bilingual. For example, Peal and Lambert (1962) who compared, in Montreal, the test scores of verbal and nonverbal intelligence of french-english bilingual children and monolingual children, aged ten year, noticed a certain intellectual superiority which they attriute to a large « cognitive flexibility » resulting from the habit of moving from a system of symbols to another. These cognitive benefits associated with bilingual development are found in creative tasks, metalinguistic skills and verbal creativity. As mentioned previously, it should be emphasized the importance of early foreign language teaching from the point of view of the personality of the child. Indeed, how can we better educate the child in the otherness by offering him a teaching of foreign languages from an early age ? By discovering early another language and another culture, the child will aquire an intellectual openness and will have a better chance to understand others. I am therefore in favor of a bilingual education for all from kindergarten onwards. A good example has been demonstrated in Luxemburg for many years where three languages are being taught at pre-school (Luxemburg, french & German) followed by english at high school. This choice is interesting because it shows a willingness to enroll in both the heritage of the country but also internationally (without limiting itself to english). With this system of education, we do not renounce to our identity, to our cultural specificities but we turn also towards others and I really feel this is the way forward.