Rachel J. Berry and Dr. Trevor McKee, Family Sciences

With the funds received, I traveled to Russia to collect data. I was there from January through June 1997, teaching English in a kindergarten. One child was videotaped each week for 25 minutes. These videos will be analyzed and results reported in an Honors thesis for Brigham Young University’s Honors Program to be completed by April 1998. A brief account of the history of the program, the methods used for teaching, and how research was conducted will be contained in this paper.

Marina Melnikova teaches English at Perm Institute in Perm, Russia, located near the Ural Mountains. She heard about a new program for teaching English to children in a play setting with native speakers of English as teachers. She contacted Dr. Trevor McKee of Brigham Young University to learn more about his program and the possibilities of bringing it to Perm. Thanks to her extensive work and continued support, International Language Programs (ILP) was brought to Perm in the Fall of 1996.

ILP uses exclusively the methods of Dr. McKee which he outlines in the text for ILP volunteers, Duolingual Education. Dr. McKee coined the term “duolingual education,” referring to a child living in his native culture learning a second language from a native speaker of the second language.1 Dr. McKee has identified twenty-three basic mobilizing concepts (BMC’s) of language, or concepts one needs to learn to be able to express oneself in a language. Some examples of BMC’s are the concept of preferences, the concept of wants, and the concept of modification of nouns.

In an ILP kindergarten, a team of six teachers each prepare a 25 minute synchronized play episode for one of six areas: kitchen, gym, arts and crafts, shop, drama, or games. A synchronized play episode includes a song, story, main activity, and variations all emphasizing language encouraging the use of one basic mobilizing concept of language. The focus is on play, drawing a child to participate in a fun activity while immersed in the second language.

For my thesis, I am conducting one six month section of a longitudinal study by Dr. McKee. In Perm, a team of six American teachers taught English in Kindergarten 296 for three hours a day, five days a week. There were thirty-eight children enrolled, divided into groups of six to eight, I directed the videotaping of one child, Dasha, for one 25 minute synchronized play episode each week. With Dr. McKee, I will analyze these videotapes to learn about the structures and strategies young children use to learn to speak English as a foreign language. I also lived with Dasha and will be drawing on notes I made while at home.

Dasha is six years old, and at the beginning of this study had only been speaking English for four months. She had completed one semester of the ILP program.

She is very bright and progressed quickly, soon becoming one of our top students. One problem I encountered with the videotaping was that she was very shy at school and often actively participated on a linguistic level only when called upon, or when her turn arose in the course of a game. She spoke so much more freely at home. I tried to solve this problem by calling on her more frequently while she was being videotaped. I did notice, and her mother did as well, that she participated more at the end of the semester than the beginning, so she is opening up more.

It was interesting to note on a preliminary level some of the ways the children in Perm learned to speak English, Oftentimes they could understand and reply in English to us, the teachers, but they couldn’t translate into Russian what they had said in English. I believe that is because they were thinking in English–the same way native English speakers learn to think and speak in English. This shows a distinct difference between Dr. McKee’s methods and other ways of teaching second languages. Our children were learning to think and then express themselves in English as opposed to thinking in Russian, translating it in their mind to English, and then expressing it in English.

Other times it was clear that the children had made a connection of how the same concept was expressed in both Russian and English. Dasha made many of these connections early due to having me live with her, and hearing me try to learn Russian. She once said, “When to me is 100 years . . . . ” This is the Russian grammatically correct way of expressing the English equivalent “When I am 100 years old, . . . ” She understood the concept but applied Russian grammar.

I have been interested in languages and language development since I began studying Latin in the ninth grade. The opportunity to write a thesis and work with Dr. McKee is exciting. Even more fulfilling was the wonderful opportunity I had to live in Russia, to try to learn Russian there, and to teach English firsthand to children. I look forward to continuing my research and analyzing the data I collected in Perm, Russia..2

References

1. T. McKee and J. Hansen, Duolingual Education, International Language Programs: Provo, UT (1994).

2. This research was supported by the Brigham Young University Honors Department. The aid of Dr. Trevor McKee of Brigham Young University is gratefully acknowledged.