Teaching English as a Foreign Language in a Kindergarten

Teaching English as a foreign language has become very popular in today’s society, as lots of parents want their children to learn English from a young age and grow up bilingual. Thus the demand for ESL teachers has gone up and lots of parents put their children into English classes at a young age so that they pick up English along with their own mother tongue, so that they have the ability to speak English as fluently.

Children, especially kindergarten, are at the developmental stage of expressing themselves and have an innate curiosity. They, at this age, are eager to learn and enjoy classroom environments because they are able to interact with other children, play games and sing songs, and seek praise from the teacher. Their minds are still being shaped and they tend to pick up language very fast at this age, while maybe not completely correctly, they aren’t afraid to try speaking in English nor are they fazed when they say something wrong. In my experience, if a teacher corrects a young learner’s language, the child will simply repeat it the right way and be pleased when they get praised. Generally then, next time, the child will say the phrase or sentence, or even word, the correct way due to the earlier positive reinforcement from the teacher. This is also because at kindergarten, their minds are still so young and thus will automatically register that this way is the correct way to say it. As I said before, children this young are still having their minds shaped by the world and their parents.

However, a big part of the way children see the world falls upon their teachers, whose job it is to teach them the language of the world. It is no different whether the teacher is an EFL teacher, because they are still teaching the young child another way to look at the world and the language that is that world. Thus children look to teachers for guidance, acceptance, encouragement and advice and at such a young age trust the teacher inexplicably to point them in the right direction, and lead them down the right path. On this matter though, as it is EFL, the parents of the children sometimes don’t speak fluent English, and might not speak English at all. In my experience, most of my young learner’s parents speak some level of English – some are fluent and some are not – but in lots of other countries this probably wouldn’t be the case. A lot of the parents, as well as their children, look to the teacher for guidance and advice and trust the teacher on what their child needs. Thus the teacher has a big responsibility when teaching kindergarten, with not only ensuring that the child learns English, but also that the child is happy, engaged and enjoys coming to the lessons.

Teaching EFL to kindergarten differs immensely to teaching teenagers or adults, due to children’s short attention spans. Therefore, because of this, the lessons should be about engaging the children and ensuring that they have a good time, by not spending too much time on a particular topic in case they get bored, and by focusing on topics that are interesting to the children. In my experience, when teaching kindergarten, it is more about encouraging the children to use the language automatically rather than teaching them verbs and tenses and the trickier parts of learning English. Instead, with children this age, as they learn to speak English, as with any native English speaker, the language should just come naturally to them and they would learn as others do. Similarly, in my experience children learn the best through play, songs and games and one of the most rewarding experiences in teaching kindergarten is when you realize that the children playing on the floor next to you with the blocks or toys, are conversing with each other in English rather than their native language.