English learning should start from young age

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.