Learning English for Young Learners “The Aspect of Intercultural Dimension, Diversity Arts and Media in the Early Foreign Language Education”

Abstract

In the age of globalisation, the world is drawing closer together and English as the world language to connect the people of this world to be understand each other, is became the most important tool for communication. For a better understanding of cultural diversity and global interrelation in ways of life in different culture context, the people should use the right and the correct English to avoid misunderstanding and miss-communication. To learn a foreign language in this case English certainly is not easy, especially in the higher age. In the 1950s and 1960s the early learning of foreign languages was enthusiastically espoused with excessive expectations largely in the belief that the pre-pubertal period was the best, even critical, for second as well as first language learning (Doye 2000, p. 5). Young children can form a language „competence“ on the basic of quite limited exposure to adult language use. From other side the young learner, especially until age eleven (Doye 2000, p. 5) can learn a foreign language without accent and can talk almost similarly like a native speaker. As we generally know, if we ask the English teachers about the aim of their teaching, they would answer Linguistic Competence. What they mean is the ability to use and to understand the language. People spoke of four skills that had to be acquired in a language: speaking, listening, writing and reading. These skills are still listed as objectives in most of school s curricula. However, on closer inspection, one would find that these terms were used in a rather narrow sense, namely as the ability to produce well-formed sentences and to understand such sentences. What was missing was the recognition of the social dimension of language; that any use and understanding of language is determined by such conditions as setting, communicative intention, the relationship between partners and so on. The teacher should realize that producing well-formed sentences was no longer enough, but that the ability to use such sentences in communication was required. The overall aim of foreign language instruction was changed from „Linguistic Competence“ to “Communication Competence“. For this, in schools the pupils had to learn to perform speech acts and to know the culture of that foreign language what they learn under all the usual conditions and restrictions that prevail when we use language. Primary school teachers concentrated on the pragmatic domain. The aim at a certain level of achievement in the basic skills of listening comprehension and writing. Little and no attention was paid to the cognitive and the attitudinal domain and no attempts were made to integrate the three into the superordinate goal of intercultural communicative competence. The pupils had to learn to perform, can t be without the involves of their teacher. The didactic adherents to pragmatics had lost sight of the content aspect by concentrating almost exclusively on the performance of speech acts. They tended to neglect that communication is always about something, and this something is embedded in the context of a particular culture and cannot be separated from it. The good communication can be able to present, when the people has the understanding at least a part of the culture of which this language a prominent part and, maybe, it most perfect expression. The foreign language users should learn and should know that culture of the language which they learn. The cultural studies should be integrated in the language learning in the classroom, especially for the young learners. They should be a language and a culture awareness when they are able to use that language later on. The time of globalisation is the time of integration and it should be an important aim of foreign language education in order the aim of the Inter cultural Communicative Competence can reached. It can t be denied and that is naive to ignore and not to know the globalisation process and it s effect to the next generation. The environment in which most children grow up today is no longer monocultural. They do have contact with members of other cultures and direct experience of foreign influences from an early age onwards. From now on, the primary school 6th International Conference on English Language and Teaching (ICOELT 2018) Copyright © 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 276