A New Necessity in Foreign Language Teaching: Teaching Children a Second Language

Dublin Core

Title

A New Necessity in Foreign Language Teaching: Teaching Children a Second Language

Author

Savlı, Fusun

Abstract

Up until the 20th century, dissemination of English language by means of the colonies of England and the dominance of the United States of America resulted in the perception, acknowledgement and learning of English as the only language by millions of people. However, numerous studies have been conducted on the necessity of learning a foreign language in the last 30 to 40 years. Particularly resulting from the age of communication that our world experiences, and the insufficiency of speaking their own languages while different nations communicate with one another lead to the increase of the studies on foreign language teaching in number in recent years. The most significant aim of these studies is to promote the cooperation between the members of the European Union in any field. For that matter, the European Union raised the consciousness of a multilingual and multicultural European citizenship in order to ensure the protection and learning of different languages and cultures making up the richness of Europe. Accordingly, it laid down the educational policy of the European Union which is in force in many European countries. One of the issues on which the most numerous studies have been carried out is the “early teaching of foreign language”. In this presentation, we aim at answering such questions as what early teaching of foreign language is, why it is important and how it should be ensured, with special reference to the approaches to be taken into consideration and linguistic skills to be acquired during the early teaching of foreign language after touching upon the policies of foreign language being implemented in the European Union and in Turkey. In addition, we shall offer some suggestions on the actions to be taken in order to render this process more efficient for children and to improve their success.

Keywords

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

Date

2012-05

Extent

830