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Introducing very young children to English as a foreign language
Author(s) -
Scheffler Paweł
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
international journal of applied linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.712
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1473-4192
pISSN - 0802-6106
DOI - 10.1111/ijal.12035
Subject(s) - linguistics , psychology , documentation , foreign language , meaning (existential) , period (music) , developmental psychology , mathematics education , computer science , art , philosophy , psychotherapist , programming language , aesthetics
This paper describes how two very young P olish children were introduced to E nglish through children's animation series, with meaning being made clear through translation. The children were first exposed to E nglish when they were 21 months. After two years of exposure, documentation of their E nglish utterances took place over a period of six weeks starting when the children were four years and three months. The children's use of language is compared with utterances produced by children attending monolingual E nglish instruction in a formal setting. The comparison shows a more spontaneous and creative use of E nglish by the children in this study. This indicates that a bilingual approach in which children simply experience a foreign language at home may be more effective than monolingual teaching in a formal setting.