I learned English properly in my forties, in Canada, having arrived with a chemistry degree, a suitcase and a vocabulary assembled from films. So I have opinions about how it is taught, most of them formed by doing it the hard way.
If you are raising a child in a language that is not the household's first, here is what I would tell you.
Vocabulary lists are the slowest road
A word learned alone is a word that has to be recalled deliberately, every time, from a list. That is exhausting and it is why so many people can pass an exam and not order a coffee.
A word learned inside a rhyme comes back on its own, attached to the line before it. The child is not recalling, they are continuing. Those are different mental acts and only one of them survives a real conversation.
Rhyme is doing three jobs at once
- It fixes the word order, so the grammar comes along without being taught.
- It fixes the stress, which is most of what makes a foreign accent hard to follow.
- It makes the next word predictable, so a child can join in before they can produce anything themselves.
That third one matters more than it looks. A child who can complete a line has spoken English out loud without the fear that usually attends it.
Songs before sentences
A five-year-old will sing in a language they cannot yet speak, cheerfully and without embarrassment. Nobody knows quite why the fear does not attach to singing, but it does not, and you should use that while it lasts.
Sing the same one until they are sick of it. Repetition is not a failure of variety, it is the method.
Stories with animals in them
A fable has a small vocabulary and a strong shape. The child can follow it from the pictures even when a third of the words are new, and following it is what keeps them there.
Abstract stories about feelings do not survive translation gaps. Concrete stories about a fox who did something stupid survive almost anything.
What I would do in a bilingual house
- Keep the home language at home. English at school is enough English. Children who lose the family language lose more than a language.
- One book, many times. Ten readings of one story beat one reading of ten.
- Let them mix. A sentence half in each is a child thinking, not a child failing.
- Do not correct mid-sentence. Say it back correctly afterwards, in passing, and move on. Correction mid-flow teaches a child to stop talking.
What this set does for that
Sing Me a Fable is twenty-six fables in rhyme with twenty-six songs and twenty-six karaoke videos, the words on screen with a moving highlight.
The karaoke is the part that matters for a second language. The child hears the word, sees the word, and follows the highlight at the speed of the voice. Three channels at once, which is the whole reason songs work.
It is also, and I say this as somebody who spent a decade sounding wrong, a way to get the stress right. English stress is not learnable from a page. It is learnable from a tune.
$49.95 during the launch. And the twenty-six colouring posters are free, which for a family testing whether this approach suits their child is a sensible place to start.