If parents have the skills and the will to teach their child a foreign language from an early age, they will provide him with an invaluable gift, one that would last a lifetime. The transfer of knowledge from parent to child is fast and natural, with the added benefit of the bonding that takes place while teaching/learning.
The resources for teaching your child a foreign language are practically limitless in the age of the internet. There are language lessons available online, even for free, on TV, on CD, in print - textbooks, poetry and fiction for children - and in dedicated schools. But the first decision that needs to be made is : at what age do I introduce my child to a new language ?
Well, my son was five when I started teaching him English. This was shortly after teaching him the alphabet in our mother tongue, Romanian. My intention was to enable him to communicate easily and proficiently in both languages, simultaneously if possible. I was conscious of the fact that had I waited another year or so, he would always be translating thoughts from his mother tongue in order to speak English, therefore slowing down his fluency. But how to cram the extra information into the brain of a boisterous, willful small creature, more inclined to play than to study ?
The answer appeared to me in the form of two bats lying strewn in our courtyard. Handing one over to my son, I told him the news that from that day onwards we would be playing "baseball" together using the two bats. While he was jumping up and down in anticipation, I made up some basic rules, the most important of which was to speak English while playing.
During that first lesson I taught him ten new words - words like play, ball, bat, run, stop, and so on. He was delighted, it was as if we were speaking in a code all our own. It helped that I let him win more games than he lost.
So, the ball game became a fixture of our summer afternoons, and I soon followed with more of the same kind of "lessons". We would sit on the swings at sunset and we would do role playing as if in a real telephone conversation, in English. I would invent a client from a faraway country who would ring and ask to speak to his Dad. "What would you say to him ?", I would challenge my son. At the prospect of not knowing what to say, he would be all ears to learn and absorb, in preparation for the day when he could get the chance to be his Dad's receptionist.
Another exercise (but don't use that word in the presence of a child, it makes him balk) was to get him to imagine a toy store (or a candy parlor) from another country. How would he ask the shop assistant for his favorite toys ? Again, his attention was with me 100 percent as he tried to learn what he figured was most important to him during our frequent travels. That same year I taught him how to call the police in a foreign language, what to say if he got lost (he did, once, on a ferry) and how to spell his parents' name, address and telephone number. By using this method, he did not display attention-spam problems or learning fatigue.
With these basic language skills covered and drilled subtly while playing games, we progressed to children's poetry books. I discovered quite by chance that children's poems, due to the high humor content and the rhymes pleasant to the ear, are delightful tools for developing a child’s "feel" for the language.
At school, my son already had a head start over his peers. To my family’s delight, Victor always got top grades in English and won several awards when competing in local and county English language contests.
