Foreign Language Learning
at the ELementary Level

 This site was created for a First Year Honors Tutorial in Second Language Acquisition at Mount Holyoke College with Professor Van Handle.



When I spent my junior year of high school in France, I volunteered at the Montessori School in Rennes, Brittany. Some classmates and I taught English to a group of kindergartners once a week. The teachers asked us to speak nothing but English with the children, but we soon realized that this was nearly impossible; we had to translate phrases for them or they were lost. It took quick thinking to come up with new and interesting ways for them to learn English vocabulary because it was so hard for them to pay attention for more than a minute or two.

I wondered what other methods elementary school teachers of foreign languages used, and how they made sure that their students were actually acquiring some language skills that they could use in secondary school. As I studied second language acquisition this year, I read about some of the methods implemented and experimented with at all levels of schooling. My goal in this research was to find out what different strategies must be used to teach a second language to small children, as well as if teachers believe that teaching foreign languages at a young age is effective, and how they think it might serve their students in the future. My hypothesis is that the teaching methods used in elementary school foreign language programs have to be more oriented toward visual, oral, and aural language skills instead of reading and writing proficiency, and that the activities must be short and diverse to hold the students' attention for the entire class.