Seminar Paper - from Helen Doron - Part 3

Does repeated listening to a Foreign Language create two separate phonological systems in monolingual 2-year-olds?

This technique is used by Helen Doron Early English (HDEE). This method claims to teach the infants English by a mothertongue methodology. The infants receive audiocassettes / CD of the course, full of songs, rhymes, stories and conversations. The infants hear portions of them (about 15 minutes) at home at least twice daily; the infants also meet with the teacher in small groups once weekly. The background hearing means that the infant does not have to consciously pay attention to the audiocassette / CD – the infant will be playing, dressing, eating etc. while the cassette plays. “All the sets are based on this principle of repeated hearing and the learning of the meaning of the sounds already heard by fun games and activities as opposed to translation. In this way the child learns to think in English directly and does not perceive English as a translation of his mother tongue. Also the child feels 'at home' with English and does not have to strain to learn; the learning comes naturally and spontaneously.” (Doron, 2001).

The purpose of the research is to see whether this mothertongue methodology creates differentiated phonological systems for monolinguals (not learning a second language from birth) as for the bilinguals (are systematically exposed to two languages from birth), thus creating a different type of bilingual which we will coin a “Twolingual”.

3. METHOD

The method followed the guidelines and method of the Paradis study, 2001.

3.1 Participants

The infants were tested for sentence truncation according to the patterns of English and Hebrew. There were three groups of participants in this study:

• A group of monolingual English-speaking two-year olds; average age 32 months.
• A group of monolingual Hebrew-speaking two-year olds; average age 27 months.
• A group of Twolingual (monolingual, but with the foreign language input a few times a day on audiocassette / CD from the age of about 12 months) English / Hebrew two-year olds; average age 33 months.

Although there were clear differences in the age average, as Paradis (2001) writes in the results that there was no significant correlation between age and truncation rate in the results of her three groups, this present study did not attempt to assure that all the two-years-olds came out to a similar average age in the three groups.

The monolingual Hebrew-speakers were interviewed in two kindergartens. The monolingual English-speakers were interviewed in the UK by the kindergarten teacher and by the author's sister. The Twolingual children were recruited through teachers of Helen Doron Early English who had taught these children starting at the age of 18 months upward. Bilingual and trilingual children were excluded from this study. The children's linguistic background was carefully established by asking the kindergarten teacher or the parents about the children's language environment at home. We presumed all the Twolinguals to be Hebrew dominant in preference.