We’ve Got It All Wrong. 關於兒童美語, 我們做錯的幾件事.
We’ve got the wrong approach when it comes to teaching English to very young (3-7 years) and young (8-12) learners. We’ve been naively going about it the very same way we do with teens and adults. Such an approach obviously fails to take into consideration the particularity of this group of learners.
Around the world and particularly in Taiwan, children are learning English at a much younger age than their parents did. This is surely due the widespread belief that, when it comes to languages, the sooner children start to learn a language the better it is. It’s probably also due to parents and policy makers desire to offer kids the best start in life with the hope that it’ll translate into positive outcomes when they mature: travelling the world and getting around in cities worry-free, communicating confidently with people around the world, at work and in social settings, being able to understand and sing one’s favorite song, studying abroad or conducting researches, getting better opportunities in life (good grades at school, well-paying jobs…)
Parents rightly have high expectations invested in their children English learning. But these expectations will soon turn into disappointment if we continue down the path we’re on right now. As a matter of fact, starting early alone will not improve children’ ability to learn and speak English. Many parents can already attest to that. Their kids went to “bilingual” kindergartens for 3 to 4 years and went or have been going to English cram schools for 1 or 4 years. And yet, they’re not confidently speaking English.
There are definitely many and different ways in which the system is failing our kids and betraying the expectations of many parents. Discussing all of them would require a book. We would however like to point out in the following three of them. We believe that these three combined do more harm than any other set of ways.
1. Grammar Almighty. Teaching grammar to very young and young learners is the most obvious misunderstanding of how children learn languages. It’s a waste of time and a misuse of their incredible potential to work out these structures by themselves. The belief that somehow, in orders to speak a language, one needs to consciously master its grammar is not just misleading; it’s false and pernicious. We parents know better. We’ve been through that before. Grammar-based approaches call for accuracy and accuracy breeds reservation, fear of losing face, reluctance to have a go in class. It’s a fluency killer. This approach might be good at producing short terms results in tests, but it surely hinders the long term goal of proficiency.
2. Everything Textbook. There is something inherently wrong with our approach when we hand over an English textbook to a three or five years old child and expect him to learns English like adults do. There are even textbooks for 幼幼班. Where do kids of this age learn their mother tongue through textbooks? If they don’t need textbooks to acquire their mother tongues, they certainly can do without them in acquiring English. And this is actually the way to go. They just need a rich content input and meaningful interactions with the adult role models. In regards with young learners, many spend their noses in the textbooks trying to complete the listening, reading and writing activities rather than actually using and playing with the language.
3. Grades. Grades. Grades. There is this misguided notion, which finds its roots in our obsessions with numbers, results and KPIs, that we can improve learning by regularly measuring learners’ performances in tests and that only what are measurable matters. Saying that grades are everything in Taiwanese education system is arguably an understatement. I’m not a proponent of grades in Education. I’m strongly against grading in language learning and especially that of very young and young learners. For them, content or meaning comes before the form of language used. However grading systems are mainly concerned with the form (subject/verb agreement, orthography…). There! You can see the gap between what these learners are trying to do – communicate – and what we, parents and educators, are trying to obtain – a proof of job completion at best and a token of good conscience at worst.
For kids to really learn, for them to embrace English as a useful and living language, we need to let go of the old ways of teaching. Speaking English is a daring experience. And we, parents and educators, need to show them such a way by willingly letting go of the beliefs that we held so long for true: that in order to speak English, you’ve got get your grammar act together; that all you need to know is in the textbook; that your grades will tell me how well you’ve been learning. It ain’t true.