Playground Observations. #1: The Magic Word or a Threat?

Having two kids, I often spend my time at the playground. It is interesting to listen to moms and nannies talk. There are a couple of funny things that I have noticed in the playground language. Here's one of them.

I often hear moms try to teach their kids to use the "Magic Word" - PLEASE: ПОЖАЛУЙСТА. To do that they make sure they use it themselves. Good tactic! Nothing wrong about it. But one should listen to how they use it! They usually use it when they want their kid to do or not to do something the kids may not find pleasant. And the intonation they use - High Fall intonation or ИК-2 turns the whole magic word into a threat. 

Паша, подой\ди сюда, пожалуйста! 

Вася, не си\ди на земле, пожалуйста! 

Маша от\дай, пожалуйста, игрушку девочке! 

All these sentences, to sound polite, should be pronounced with the High Rise + Low Tail intonation pattern known in Russian as ИК-3. In fact, ИК-3 bears the meaning of "please", it makes the sentence polite even without the magic word. If moms used this intonation pattern without "please" they would sound so much more polite than with "please" but with a High Fall intonation - ИК-2! Moms also pronounce the word ПОЖАЛУЙСТА slowly, usually with minimal reduction, they stamp on every syllable, turning the usual casual [пaжАлстъ] into [пажАлустъ].  I wonder what message kids get when they hear such usage of PLEASE?! 

"Morning!" vs "Good Evening!"

A couple of months ago, when I was teaching the intonation of English greetings, one of my students asked me, why we can greet people by saying "Morning!", omitting "Good", and can not do the same with "Good evening!". That was an interesting question. I had not thought about it before. 

But then, when I started explaining how "Good morning!" lost its "Good", everything became very clear. The answer is simple: because the word 'evening' starts with a vowel, while the word 'morning' starts with a consonant. Consonants undergo assimilation, while vowels do not. So what happens to "Good morning!"?

Good morning!

Goob morning!

Goom morning!

Gm morning!

Gmorning!

Morning!

In "Good evening!" 'd' and 'e' can not assimilate. Therefore - nothing happens!

Is Teaching English to Toddlers in a Kindergarten a Waste of Time?

In her comment to my post "Teaching Young Kids" my former student Galina wrote, "I still consider that it's waste of time in the case of an odinary kindergarten where a teacher comes twice or even once a week for 15-20 minutes. And you should also take into account that kids of this age often get ill and stay at home." So the question remains: Is it a waste of time?

I remember when I went to a kindergarten, we had English lessons for a while. I was about 5 years old at that time. Was it a waste of time? Pretty much. All I remember from those lessons was a beautiful big picture of a family - we were learning how to say "mother", "father", etc.; and how the teacher told us that we should make our lips look like those of a fish to pronounce the sound [u]. That's all. Galina is absolutely right. If this is what's going on at a lesson, it is a waste of time. A teacher needs to be a genius to make those lessons really useful. Therefore to have such lessons, we need to ask the question: What can we achieve in this situation? What should be our goal? What can be achieved at this age? 

I think that the key words here should be LANGUAGE EXPOSURE. Since at this age the oral perception is so much better developed than the performance, we should focus at providing adequate material for the children to absorb. To a certain extent children will be able to reproduce what they acquire right away, some of them more than others. But most of this material will then be stored in their memories until the point when their command of their organs of speech will be good enough to fully use what they have acquired. To achieve good results the teacher will have to work closely with the parents, advising them on what kind of English language cartoons, movies, songs and chants they should play for their kids at home on an every day basis. Without this cooperation Galina's phrase - waste of time! - may be quite relevant!

So, what kind of material? In my previous message I pointed out that words should not be learnt outside of context. What I meant by that is that they should be learnt in a phrase, with the correct intonation. I personally know quite a few French words, but when I use them I often feel that this is not the way French people use them. And it is not only idioms I mean. Something as simple as finding out a person's age is expressed in different languages in a different way: English: How old are you? French: Quel age as-tu? (=Which age have you?) Russian: Сколько тебе лет? (= How many years are you?). In my experience the best way of doing it is using CHANTS. They combine rhythm, intonation, phrasing and vocabulary with the easiness to learn whole phrases by heart. It is also very easy to change words in chants, so that the formula of a phrase remains the same, but you use more vocabulary, once the chant is learnt well. It is easy to use phrases from chants in dialogs.

What else do I mean by LANGUAGE EXPOSURE? In my experience I've noticed that it is a lot easier to teach students who are bilingual or speak just one language but have been or are exposed to more. For example, every time I get a student who spent his/her childhood in any former republic of the Soviet Union where besides Russian people speak their ethnic language as well (Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Tatar, Uzbek - you name it!), the student is so much easier to teach! Sounds and intonation are just a piece of cake! The student may or may not speak the ethnic language himself, but their exposure to the different sounding language in the childhood sort of trains the ear. I had a most unusual student about 2 years ago. She was bilingual, and her native language was Ukrainian. Even though Ukrainian is so close to Russian, the intonation patterns may differ, and Luba spoke both Russian and Ukrainian equally well. She spoke English a lot worse than the other students in her group - she had been only learning it for 2 years, while some of the other students had been learning it for 5, 7 or more years. Her grammar was bad, her vocabulary was not rich, but when it came to intonation, she could imitate anything! She was the best! It was quite amazing! 

I wrote this to show that even passive exposure to another language in the early childhood can be very beneficial for learning a foreign language in the future.  By exposing kindergarten kids to English we may lay a strong foundation for their future acquisition of English at school. But it should be a true exposure - not just teaching a couple of words and phrases! This foundation will not be very visible - it is below the surface - but if we are doing it right, it will be a lot easier to build on top of it, rather than start anew.

Мишка, Гришка, Пощипай ехали на лодке...

There are different ways words develop their meaning in a language. There is a phenomenon called 'etymological doublets' or sometimes 'triplets', when in a language there are several words with somewhat different meanings, even though they have the same original source or root. The reason they have different meanings and look different is that because they entered the language as borrowings from different languages at different times. Typical examples of doublets in English are captain and chieftain, chief and chef, frail and fragile.

There is an interesting process going on at the present moment with one of the Russian verbs which very well may lead to the creation of a pair of doublets, even though strictly speaking they will not qualify as real doublets since they will develop not by being borrowed from different languages, but through their incorrect conjugation in the Russian vernacular - просторечие.

There are several Russian verbs which add the letter "л" ("l") in the middle when they are conjugated, and which do not have it in the infinitive. They do create a certain difficulty for foreigners learning Russian. But unless the letter "l" appears only in the first person singular and nowhere else (like in the verbs любить - люблю - любит; копить - коплю - копят; топить - топлю - топят) such verbs may create a certain difficulty even for native Russian speakers. I would like to look at 3 such verbs: КАПАТЬ, СЫПАТЬ and ЩИПАТЬ.

The verb КАПАТЬ can be conjugated both, with the intruding "l" letter and without it. Both ways are correct and listed in dictionaries: КАПАЮ, КАПАЕШЬ and КАПЛЮ, КАПЛЕШЬ. The only thing that can be added here is that the variant with "l" may sound a little outdated, it is rarely used nowadays and even in the dictionary the example comes from an old idiom: НЕ КАПЛЕТ НАД КЕМ-ЛИБО.

The verb СЫПАТЬ can only be conjugated with the letter "l" in the middle: СЫПЛЮ, СЫПЛЕШЬ. С утра СЫПЛЕТ мокрый снег. I have to admit, that even though this is the only correct variant of conjugating this verb, not everybody remembers it and quite a few people incorrectly  say СЫПЕТ, СЫПЕШЬ, СЫПЯТ instead. One can imagine that in 50 or 100 years from now the variant without "l" in the middle may become a new norm.

But the most interesting thing is happening to the verb ЩИПАТЬ. The correct way to conjugate it is WITH the "l" in the middle: ЩИПЛЮ, ЩИПЛЕШЬ, ЩИПЛЕТ, ЩИПЛЕМ, ЩИПЛЕТЕ, ЩИПЛЮТ. This correct variant is used quite infrequently nowadays. Unfortunately, even some (not to say many) educated people omit the letter "l". It is even registered in dictionaries as "colloquial". Now, what is really interesting, is that there are 2 ways of conjugating this verb, when used in просторечие - vernacular (I would still prefer to say it is vernacular, rather than colloquial speech). It all depends on the meaning. If what is meant is "TO PINCH", people usually say: ЩИПАЮ, ЩИПАЕШЬ, ЩИПАЕТ, ЩИПАЕМ, ЩИПАЕТЕ, ЩИПАЮТ (-СЯ can be added): Не щипайся! А Ваня щипается! Пощипай его! If what is meant is "TO STING" or "TO BURN", especially in impersonal sentences, people usually say:  ЩИПЕТ (again, -СЯ can be added):  Мазь сильно ЩИПЕТ. В горле ЩИПЕТ. Мороз ЩИПЕТ уши. 

So what we get here is a sort of doublets with identical infinitive forms but different conjugation patterns depending on the meaning! In English, for example, there is no such verb which would mean both "to pinch" and the burning or stinging sensation on the skin. May be in Russian, again, in 50 or 100 years from now these will be different verbs?

Teaching Young Kids

A couple of days ago, Barbara from Snapvine, who teaches young children aged 3-6 in a kindergarten in Poland, asked me about teaching English at an early age. One of her concerns was that at this age children have a hard time mastering their mother tongue, let alone a foreign language. 

It is well known that at an early age it is a lot easier for children to acquire a second language if they find themselves among the native speakers of that language. Even if the situation is artificially created, it helps a lot. Here in Moscow, for example, there are a couple of kindergartens attended by foreign children of all nationalities whose parents happen to work in Russia. In the kindergarten they have to communicate in English. A Russian friend of ours was very smart and enrolled her 3-year old son to such a kindergarten about 7 years ago. The result was phenomenal. Her son who is about 11 now speaks English almost as a native speaker.

It is also well-known that teaching a foreign language to young kids at an early age is a big challenge for a teacher. Even though young children obviously have the ability to easily acquire a second language, in the classroom environment it doesn't work. So, what do we need to understand and take into account here?

1. Young children have a phenomenal ability to absorb new knowledge and skills, but their performance is lagging behind. They do not have a good physical command of their body yet - including organs of speech and voice - and therefore we should not expect quick and spectacular results. The most important thing at this age is being exposed to a foreign language. Even if they do not repeat things well enough, the good (or bad!) example will stick to their memory. So, it is crucial to always use authentic audio material! - rather than having kids repeat after a non-native teacher. 

2. Young children are representatives of ORAL CULTURE - think of Ancient Greece and Homer, think of modern tribes in Amazonia, Indian Ocean, think of how history of tribes and peoples was passed on from generation to generation before writing was invented. Oral culture has its own ways of learning things. Forget about logic, linear  and abstract thinking, teaching simple things first - complicated afterwards. In oral societies people live in the acoustic space: they rely upon their ears as much as upon their eyes (just think of us - we never rely on our ears, always asking 'how do you spell it?' when we hear an unfamiliar word, especially a name, even in our own language!). In oral societies people learn things by heart easily with the help of rhythm, music and multiple repetition - this is why chants are so typical of them. In oral societies people live and acquire knowledge in a 3D mode, from all angles at once, not one thing after another. 

BOTTOM LINE

What We Should NOT Do While Teaching English to Young Kids:

• Start with the alphabet or teach it before kids are at least 6 years old.
  
• Have them repeat everything after a non-native English speaking teacher.
• Teach them words out of context, just providing the translation into their mother tongue.

What We SHOULD Do While Teaching English to Young Kids:

• Expose children to as much authentic audio material as possible.
• Have them learn by heart as much authentic audio material as possible.
• Have the audio material consist of mostly chants, songs, poems, finger-plays and short dialogues.
• Play around these chants, songs, etc., turning them into little shows, scenes, games and conversations, having children use the phrases they have already learnt by heart with the correct intonation. Have them repeat what they know well multiple times.
• Try to teach them using rhythm: English is very rhythmical, and its rhythm is quite uniquely close to the rhythm of songs. Use songs and turn them into speech: just leave the melody out, but stick to the rhythm!
• Always remember that pronunciation and intonation can only be well acquired at an early age, when children still rely on their ears! Don't bother even thinking of grammar and having them learn as many words as possible! When they grow up they will easily learn words and understand grammar. But they will never be able to hear the sounds and intonation in the way they hear it while being young. 

RECOMMENDATION:

Use Carolyn Graham's "Children's Jazz Chants: Old & New". You can plan your whole course around those wonderful chants, keeping the kids and yourself  happy!