Rethinking our approach to teaching English to VYLs and YLs will require that teachers and parents alike become more aware of how this particular category of learners do learn languages. And the final point that we will discuss is how they learn languages through interactions.
Confirming or modifying their hypotheses of the rules that govern the language, picking up accents, decoding facial expressions and body languages, codes of conduct, transferring concepts from one
language to another language…are arguably the best and the most obvious illustrations of VYLs and YLs learning through interactions.
VYLs and YLs have this incredible ability to produce any sound by looking at another person’s mouth, producing the sound, check-correcting themselves and fine-tuning it until they get it right. Here is an interesting conversation between a Japanese professor and a seven years old child in the suburb of South London recounted by Opal Dunn, which gives us a glimpse into how well and how fast VYLs and YLs can pick-up accents. It goes down as follows:
Professor: You speak like a local kid. Where did you learn your English?
Child: All summer I went out into the park and played.
In one of my 5th grade classes, I once gave an example of a negative reply sentence by repeating the “no” – i.e. “No, no, no, no, I don’t like apples”. The next thing I know, they were all doing the same in all negative and positive replies, laughing and giggling about it. It’s not that they don’t use “不, 不, 不, 不” or “對, 對, 對, 對” in Chinese. But they probably never transferred this into English until they heard me. They’re used to “No, I don’t like apples” or “Yes, I like apples”.
Meaningful interactions with adults or older children are the corner stone of language learning for VYLs and YLs. The primary reasons for speaking a language is to communicate with the people that matter the most to us. And the good news is these interactions require little if any at all explanation, of grammar rules for example. It just happens….by playing like the Japanese child put it.
Two of the main implications which come out of this are:
• We should limit to the bare minimum the time kids spend on textbooks, workbooks and alike and increase that of meaningful interactions that provide language practices.
• We should only provide grammar rules explanation when kids ask for it. This is the time when they are stuck in making sense of the hypotheses they’ve been working out in their minds.
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