The Ministry of Higher and secondary education of the Republic of Uzbekistan

The Advantages of Teaching English to Young Children

On the one hand, small children benefit substantially from learning a foreign language. They consider English classes to be fun and interactive. It is next to impossible for a teacher not to use games and songs in the classroom. Singing Super Simple Songs, young students learn sounds, words, and even phrases. Such songs are usually catchy and they are accompanied by a funny video.

As for games, which can be frequently used in the classroom, they all, obviously, need to have an educational purpose. They must be simple and fun as well. It is quite an effective way to learn and review vocabulary through games. For example, a variation of Hopscotch helped me a lot when I was teaching kids in a kindergarten in China. As a consequence, children learn and do not realize that they are learning.

Furthermore, I believe that such an early commencement of learning English develop both receptive and productive skills. Let us examine the former skills, which are listening and reading. Kids acquire listening skills at a very young age and it helps them throughout their lives. They are likely to understand English words and phrases in different songs and natural speech.

In addition, they may learn letters and spelling in a kindergarten and it will definitely help them at school when they start to read. Coming back to productive skills, I want to mention that young children eventually get used to a foreign language and they can pronounce words and use some phrases themselves.

What is more important, they understand the meaning as a teacher must have used pictures or objects to show the meaning of the word rather than translating them. If they keep acquiring vocabulary in such a way, they will avoid translation from L1 afterward and become more fluent.