Introducing very young children to English as a foreign language

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.