파닉스 중심의 한국 유아 영어 교육의 문제점과 제언

Abstract

Many Korean parents try to expose their children to English as early as they can, because they believe that it is the head-start for their children to be proficient in English. However, they tend not to consider the way to teach English to the early childhood students. Most of them start to learn English with 'phonics' instruction regardless of their ages. This paper claims that the phonics instruction is not desirable and even harmful for the Korean infants who try to acquire native like English language skills and suggests the alternative to the phonics instruction. Phonics instruction is the method developed in the USA to teach illiterate students how to read letters and words. It couldn't be compatible with the Korean young students, especially with Korean infants. Young children have superior capability of language learning to the grown-ups. They naturally develop their language skills, such as listening, comprehending, speaking from the ambient linguistic inputs around them without any particular teaching. They even have an ability to create a new language from ungrammatical and deficient language data. Young children could be regarded as the beings to pursue a language to communicate with. It is also true to the second language learning and so some linguists assert that the children in this age are in critically sensitive period for language development. The point in this paper is that the linguistic competence the young children develop without any hard efforts is related to the domain of spoken language not to the written language which phonics instruction lay on focus. Young children are neurologically well ready to receive sound language data rather than written ones. Cognitive linguistics answer this phenomenon saying that young children process language data in a different way from adults, or their language is processed in right brain. Korean young English learners also should train their ears to English phonology system and build listening comprehension strategy which is unlearnable later in life time after their infancy passes by. The understanding of how young children develop their first language competence and how their brain work to acquire a language will help teachers manage their classes in order to weigh on acquiring than teaching or studying a language.