3-year-old linguists

Firstly, all kids need to be motivated. In the UK, praise for a child’s efforts, making learning a fun and positive experience and, as a last resort, dishing out reward-stickers was usually sufficient. But here I had a much more powerful tool -- my own very obvious inability to speak their language -- whether it be Turkish, Dutch, Russian, Hebrew or whatever. This proved a fantastic incentive. The kids soon learned that if they wanted to communicate with their teacher and their classmates they would have to learn English -- and fast!

The first job was to establish some familiar and catchy rhymes and songs with which to gain their attention and encourage some listening skills. My first attempt was to launch into a rendition of “Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool,” etc. Needless to say this was met with a wall of total blankness -- even after I had found the toy sheep from the farm box and some wool with which to explain the lyrics. I fared better with the “Five Little Monkeys” -- especially with the chosen few acting out the monkey parts. Circle games such as “Ring a Ring of Roses” and “The Farmer’s in His Den” became popular, too. But what sense could these children possibly make of any of these, where the language and allusions are beyond the comprehension even for native speakers? Ask any English 3-year-old to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and they will -- and they’ll even be able to tell you that it is about a star. But what’s in it for a child who, initially at least, has no idea what the song or rhyme is about?

Well, there’s the rhyme, the rhythm, the simple tunes and the joy of communal singing. They soon learned to love these and many more rhymes and songs, belting them out with an ever increasing gusto. “What is a bobbin?” asked the mom of one of my charges at my first parents’ consultation. I was a little taken aback until I realized where she’d picked up that rather obscure English word -- from the rhyme “Wind Your Bobbin Up.” Her child had been singing it incessantly at home, probably driving them, if not to drink, at least in search of a dictionary. (A bobbin, by the way, is a small reel on which threads such as cotton or wool are wound.) Having been alerted to the problem, I began to send copies of the words to each rhyme/song home with the children.

Next strategy -- repetition -- and lots of it. Within a week, all the children understood the “Go to the toilet and wash your hands” phrase, along with the “Tidy up time,” “Change your shoes” and “Line up” instructions. With the three meals and three trips to the garden per day, these were generally the first English words the parents would hear their offspring utter. Not only did the kids quickly learn these phrases, they very soon understood them and would echo my words and pass the instruction on to those who hadn’t heard my requests first time around.

The rest was relatively simple -- I taught as I had always taught in the UK: topic-based work with lots of stories, games, creative activities and play, the only difference being a massive use of exaggerated gestures, tone of voice and play-acting. And yes, the children did progress through the language learning stages. Firstly, they quietly absorbed a growing vocabulary, then they began to repeat my words and next my phrases. Before long they were able to answer questions with an appropriate word and soon to combine two or three words. At last came the eureka moment -- they were able to string enough words together to express their own ideas. Of course, there are many blips in the learning process. For example, rather than answering my question “What color is this?” with “Red,” “blue” or “green,” some kids will just parrot back, frustratingly, my own question.

In every area of learning, children progress at their own speed, but I have learned that certain factors make a huge difference to how quickly a child acquires a new language. Those who learn English the quickest are those who are already bilingual; unfortunately, this is not an option for most kids. But almost as important is the attitude of the parents to other languages -- the more positive the better.