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.