Teaching English to preschool children

According to experienced educators opinions teaching English must be realized step by step.

At the first, teacher should create a language-rich environment. Label different parts of the classroom and home and add an image on the labels for reinforcement. Set up listening station with English languages CDs. Fill your classroom library with bilingual and English picture books.

At the second, teacher should integrate multimodal activities into English language instruction. Education expert Howard Gardner points out that children posse multiple intelligences including logical, linguistic, interpersonal, musical, kinesthetic and spatial. Your activities should address these intelligences.

At the third, English teacher must reinforce new information. If you read a story about animals, follow up by teaching preschoolers “Old MacDonald HadaFarm” and playing around of animal charades. As children point, discuss the different colors they create and then do a science lesson about rainbows.

At the fourth, teacher should listen to children. Although children learning a new language may experience a silent period, most of them have something interesting to say when given the opportunity. Ask children simple questions that have predictable responses, such as their names and their ages.

At the fifth, teacher must illustrate abstract concepts with images, real and toys. For example, teach about rainbows by showing pictures of rainbows, creating rainbows with crystals or displaying block in a rainbow pattern.

Keep English language learning fun by using themes and vocabulary important to preschool children such as greetings, friendship, colors, toys, foods, activities and places.

Teaching English to children of elementary level

Language acquisition is one of the most impressive and fascinating aspect of human development. We listen with pleasure to the sounds made by a three-month-old baby. We laugh and “answer” the conversational “ ba-ba-ba” babbling of older babies, and we share in the pride and joy of parents whose one-year-old has uttered the first “bye-bye”.

Indeed, learning a language is an amazing feat - one that has attracted the attention of linguistic and psychologists for generations. How do children accomplish this? What enables a child not only to learn words, but to put them together in meaningful sentences? What pushes children to go on developing complex grammatical language even though their early simple communication is successful for most purposes? Does child language develop similarly around the world? How do bilingual children acquire more than one language?

In this chapter, we will look briefly at some of the characteristics of the language of young children.

We will then consider several theories that have been offered as explanations for how language is learned. There is an immense body of research on child language.

Although much research has been done in middle class North American and European families, there is a reach body of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research as well.

Researchers have travelled all over the world to observe, record, and study children’s early language development. Our purpose in this chapter is to touch on a few main points in this research, primarily as a preparation for the discussion of Second Language acquisition, which is the focus of this book.

The first three years:

Milestones and developmental sequences

One remarkable thing about first language acquisition is the high degree of similarity in the early language of children all over the world. Researchers have described developmental sequences for many aspects of first language acquisition. The earliest vocalizations are simply the involuntary crying that soon, however, we hear the cooing and gurgling sounds of contented babies, lying in their beds looking at fascinating shapes and movement around them.

By the end of their first year, most babies understand quite a few frequently replaced words. They wave when someone says, “bye-bye”; the clap when someone says “pat-a cake”; they eagerly hurry to the kitchen when “juice and cookies” are mentioned. At twelve months, most babies will have begun to produce a word or two that everyone recognizes.

• 2.1.    Methods and techniques of teaching pre-school children

The problem how to teach a foreign language to pre-school children and the children of a primary school has not been solved either in this country or abroad, though some methodologists and teachers have shown an interest in it and there are some books, papers and theses dealing with this problem.

In our country the interest for teaching young children a foreign language was aroused soon after the first schools with a number of subjects taught in a foreign language were opened in our Republic after the independence. Experience has proved that the earlier the children begin to learn a language, the better they master it. Some teachers volunteered to instruct children in a foreign language in kindergartens. It is necessary to distinguish between teaching pre-school children in the kindergarten and teaching children in primary grades in the elementary schools, as there are some psychological age characteristics which should be taken into account. Here some of them.

sense unit without any strain as easily as he learns isolated words. He encounters the same difficulty in learning the sentences: My name is Mike. I like this black cat. Give me a bear, please and words a cat, a bear. Moreover, it is easier for a child to learn a sentence than isolated words.

This phenomenon does not occur in the elementary school. The children of primary classes are more careful in their speech. They use either English or Uzbek sentences.