English learning should start from young age

By Setiono

JAKARTA (JP): English language learning at elementary level has been increasingly perceived as a burdensome subject. School children lament the excessive tasks their teachers assign such as memorizing all the things stated in their textbooks.

It is for this reason that the Minister of Education and Culture Juwono Sudarsono issued an instruction to evaluate the present English curriculum (Tempo, March 1, 1999). And if it turns out that the new curriculum really burdens learners, English will no longer be recommended as a subject for elementary level. According to the minister, English is be best started from junior high school.

English language learning indeed must be started from a tender age because language learning plays an important role in language acquisition, at least in phonological acquisition. Children learning a foreign language are more likely to eventually sound like native speakers than adults are. Adults may seem to make greater progress initially, but children nearly always surpass them.

The belief that children are better at language acquisition than adults is supported by empirical evidence. A case study carried out and reported by Asher and Garcia (1969) in their article, The Optimal Age to Learn a Foreign Language, revealed that children have the greatest probability of attaining near- native pronunciation when they are six years old or younger.

By contrast, they observed that a child who went to the United States when he or she was 13 or older had a small chance of acquiring a near-native pronunciation even if he lived there five years or more.

Moreover, a study conducted by Yamada and Kurusu (1980) also revealed that younger children are far more successful at memorizing vocabulary and pronouncing new words in a foreign language.

From the two aforementioned studies, it seems obvious that the degree of native-like proficiency depends considerably on the age of the learner. The younger the learner, the more likely that native-like proficiency will be attained.

These research findings are of particular importance when educational policy decisions must be made concerning the age or grade level at which learners are offered foreign language instruction.

The fact that children feel bored and discouraged in learning English may stem from three closely related factors. First, an English teacher may lack knowledge of subject matter pedagogy in teaching children and thus be inadequately prepared to teach the subject matter. In teaching children, many teachers still explain the abstract rules of grammar. For example, they may say to their learners that in simple present tense, inflection s/es should be used if the subject belongs to third singular persons.

Second, in conducting English classes, English teachers tend to put emphases on memorization. It is a common knowledge that our educational system from various disciplines is heavily reliant on book learning and students are expected to memorize the materials provided in the book.

Third, many English teachers still adopt authoritarian education. This type of education may hinder rather than enhance students' language acquisition.

In many English classes, instructions are still teacher centered and the students are rarely given opportunity to sustain interaction with their peers or teacher. Furthermore, under these circumstances, there are few opportunities for learning through discussion since the teacher controls the topic and direction of instruction. Also, if a teacher asks a question, there is expected to be a single right answer. Students often become upset and even frustrated when they are asked to hypothesize or speculate. They think that the teacher is withholding information when he asks "what do you think will happen?"

The above detrimental factors suggest that evaluating and revising the current English curriculum, as it is being carried out by the Ministry of Education and Culture, is not necessarily relevant to solving the present problem. Having identified the factors, it would be appropriate to focus on how teachers can be best prepared to be professional English teachers.

In other words, given the fact that a teacher can be considered as the single most important variable in the classroom affecting student achievement, English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers are subject to being trained in implementing EFL methodology.

Teaching techniques employed in children's classes are essentially distinct as those used in adult classes. In children's classes, the tasks of the teacher is not merely transferring knowledge to the learners, but the teacher must also allow their learners to interact or engage socially with their peers in order to figure out what is being said, to hear how language is being learned, as well as to see how others use language socially and communicatively.

Through this social interaction, which occurs in the context of cooperative learning lessons, less capable learners may learn the new language comfortably with their proficient peers. Another benefit of cooperative learning is that children are often comfortable trying out new expressions of a foreign language and negotiating meaning with their peers without having to worry about making mistakes.

By doing so, it is expected that children will find their English class enjoyable, even challenging, never threatening, and would therefore facilitate the process of language acquisition.

The writer is a member of the teaching staff in the English department of the School of Education at Atma Jaya University, Jakarta.