Repeated hearing

Principle

Children need to hear the target lan­guage again and again. At a later stage, they will try to say it themselves. This is how they learn their mother tongue. Lan­guage is understood passively long before it is actively used. The younger the child, the more they like songs, stories, etc to be repeated.

Practice

Record on a cassette what you want the child to learn and ask the parent to play it daily in the background while the child is playing. The child hears the language, rather than listens to it, and absorbs it nat­urally as she would her mother tongue.

Positive reinforcement

Principle

Infants learn to speak their mother tongue not only by repeated hearing, but also by positive reinforcement. The same is true of second language learning.

Practice

Children really need to hear expres­sions like ‘Great!’ ‘Wow!’ ‘Wonderful!’ ‘Very Good!’ etc all the time. But then again, to a certain extent, don't we all? En­countering great enthusiasm from parents and others, a child thinks: 'Yes, I did do that well. I'll say it again for you.'

Repeated hearing and positive rein­forcement are really the corner-stones of a child's first language acquisition. They occur naturally in the child's home en­vironment. We only need to mimic this conscientiously, to make second language acquisition as close as possible to natural acquisition.

Brain processing

Principle

It is widely taught that language is largely a function of the left side of the brain, i.e. it belongs to the brain's ana­lytical side. Yet, up until the age of two, children process language in the whole brain, using both sides. It is between the ages of two and three that language shifts to the left side of the brain.

Practice

We should not teach anything analyti­cally to very young children. We should teach naturally and clearly, doing activi­ties that we would do with native English-speaking infants of the age. This means fun activities, songs and games – but in a carefully planned manner.

Content

Principle

The content of our lessons needs to be simple and natural, using the vehicles of language acquisition that infants use to learn their mother tongue. For example, songs, rhymes (dancing rhymes and finger rhymes) and activities involving simple actions. All these incorporate whole-brain learning and have three im­portant elements – visual, auditory and kinaesthetic.

The subject matter should be relevant to the children and the vocabulary should be appealing. Lessons must be fun.

Practice

Modes of transport (cars, trucks, ships, planes, etc), animals, parts of the body, actions, food, magic, etc are all rel­evant subjects. They should all be taught through poems, rhymes and actions.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16