[Mr. E English]

Hi Zashi,

How’s it going with those two young learners – a real tough one, I can empathize.

In many ways your biggest problem is the teaching brief from the learner’s mother. A 3 year old can’t really speak fluently in his / her mother tongue let alone a foreign language. Unrealistic learning expectations from parents is often the biggest hurdle when teaching children.

Research from the clever boys and girls at university linguistic departments has shown that when we learn our L1, mother tongue, we first pick up and then produce nouns. In teaching English to children I follow this rule and start with nouns – simple things like, cat, dog, pencil, chair. Common everyday objects, food items and animals, these never seem to fail.

On the bases of this I then introduce basic sentence structures – ‘this is a dog’, ‘this is a cat’, and build from there. In a relaxed learning environment a young learner can soon pick up the necessary language, but you’ll need to wait some time before you hear your efforts in productive speech.

In full agreement with the very sound advice all the other commentators have so far given, I think a rapid change of activity within your 45 minute lesson is very necessary. When teaching the 3 year old age group I never pre-plan time schedules, this is an age group with which you very much need to go with the flow – they dictate timing!

Generally I find drawing pictures an unfailingly successful activity – “OK, let’s draw a cat” Then you draw a cat, re-enforcing the language. Colour the cat black - “It’s a black cat.” Introducing colours. Draw the ears extra big “The cat has big ears” Introducing yet more language – big / ears / to have. And so on.

Teaching this age group can be some of the most rewarding teaching and at the same time the trickiest and most exhausting. The best of luck and let us know how it goes.