Impacts of Early English Exposure on the Infant''s English Communicative Competence

• Main Authors: Hu, Ya-hung, 胡亞虹
• Other Authors: Chen, Chin-fen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/94067428496378120300

碩士 === 國立台北師範學院 === 兒童英語教育研究所 === 93 === ABSTRACT This study, from 1997 to 2002, aims to investigate the influences of early English education on the listening ability of an EFL beginner, to find out if early English education interferes with the acquisition of the child’s native language and to identify the features of English development for a child receiving early English education. This is a longitudinal qualitative case study of only one EFL child from 6 months old to 6;8 years old. Data analyses were coded with categories of metalinguistics awareness: Recognition of language varieties (RV), Repairs of utterances (RU), Spontaneous repairs (SR), Elicited repairs (ER), Correcting other’s mistakes (CM), Translation for others (TR), Interference (IF), Comprehension (CP), Correspondence and integration to the languages (CI), Nonverbal responses (NR), Mixed utterances (MU), Code-switching (CS), Nature of acquisition (NA), Intuition to judge target-like production (IJ), Sensitivity to linguistic forms (SF). The results indicate that EFL children can acquire good English listening communicative competence naturally. The subject in this study, Shannon, gave evidence that the young English learner was capable of recognizing the differences of languages-Taiwanese, Taiwanese Mandarin, Mandarin, and English; she realized there were more languages in the world than she had learned from the family, or on TV; she could distinguish the variety of English; standard American English on the Disney Channel, British English, Malaysian English, and Australian English pronunciations; she could sense the incorrect English with ease. However, little interference was detected in her speech and her languages seemed to be separate in her mind. In sum, the study results prove that early English education does not stop children from acquiring Chinese and modern EFL parents can do a lot of things to help their babies acquire English on their own. Finally, some suggestions are offered to the EFL parents, EFL teachers, educational authorities, and the researchers for future studies.