During early foreign language learning the child should be approached holistically and with due regard for his or her fundamental needs. Phases of intensive work on the new language and culture should be interspersed with ‘rest’ phases giving space for reflection and for development of powers of concentration as well as for the satisfaction of the child’s motoric needs.
The principles listed below involve factors that govern the course of classroom teaching, and to this extent reprise aspects of the preceding chapters. These principles – considered individually – are all of equal importance in determining the success of an early start in foreign languages.
- Learning must be centred on the child.
- Early years practitioners and school teachers must know and take account of the children’s individual physical and sensory learning needs, thereby ensuring that benefit accrues from the foreign language programme to the child’s emotional, social and motoric competences.
- Goals, topics, content and learning types should be defined in such a way as to have relevance to the child’s life horizons and experience. They should have a straightforward meaning and application in the child’s everyday world.
- As appropriate in the light of the child’s developmental stage, heard and spoken language is the principal learning focus, especially in the initial phases.
- In pre-school and in the early years of primary school, reading and writing should be introduced on a phased basis and little by little. Reception takes precedence over production, understanding over speaking, speaking over writing. There should be no attempt – or as little as possible – to make children aware of structures.
- Language proficiency should be built up in a spiral progression.
- Concepts that associate language learning closely with the transmission of content will permit greater openness in the types of teaching used, e.g. cross-subject learning.