13/01/2025
Online German lessons for children: How should kids learn German?
I am often approached by parents of very young children who ask me to prepare their 4-5-6 years old for school online, and I'd like to address the issue of e-learning for kids with a couple of neurolinguistic insights:
- At the age of 4-5-6 years, children learn a foreign language primarily through communication and play (motor learning), so we can not really talk about organised, guided language teaching - even if many institutions and/or miracle methods claim to be so.
- As cognitive abilities begin to develop and the function of language use changes around the age of 7-8, the situation changes. It is only at this age that language becomes a tool for thinking and expressing oneself; reaching school maturity, the focus is no longer on imitating adult speech with the purpose of communicative interaction with the environment. It is then that thinking is increasingly done through words and phrases, school kids starts to think not any more in mental images, but gradually in sentences and expressions.
- It becomes thus more important and useful to find a dear person or a welcoming community with whom and where a small child can develop emotional attachment. Regular language interaction with a beloved reference person - be it a kindergarten teacher, grandmother, best friend or a babysitter - is perfectly appropriate and enough for learning the basics of a foreign language in preschool.
- Organise therefore regular playdates, support your child building freindships, find and treasure a kind, caring babysitter who can bond with your child in German.
I am strongly opposed to online classing under the age of 10, not only for the pedagogical/psychological reasons mentioned above, but also for biological/neurological reasons, namely:
1) The attention span of a preschool child is 20 minutes max. Not to mention its need for movement and its ability to learn from human interaction and communication patterns.
Therefore, it is pointless to keep a fidgety toddler statically glued to a screen for 60 minutes, where he is being lectured to by an unknown and thus unfathomable person, sentencing a small child to be merely an observer.
To condemn a 4-5-6 year old to passively receive a mass of abstract information from an adult who is a complete stranger to him, through a virtual medium which is intangible to him, is simply absurd. Even an adult brain used to learning, like that of a university student, cannot absorb the information of a lecture online as fully as it can in a face-to-face classroom, let alone a kindergarden child who is neurologically far from to take in, digest and proceed information via formal teaching.
2) In online classes, interaction with young children is only marginally feasible, as the bitter experience of online teaching in the years of the pandemic has clearly showed, because emotion based, personal interactions are essential to secure children's attention.
The online environment can not substitute for traditional classroom interactions with plenty of hands-on learning, teamwork and peer learning, the social benefits and the simple joy to be part of a close-knit class community not to mention.
3) There is so much going on on a screen to distract a young child from finding and focusing on the assigned task or the given explanation. A noisy blinking screen is a whirlwind of colorful stimuli that overloads the receptive faculties of a 4-5-6 year old child, saturating his nervous system with a mass of incoming information which he cannot filter or select the required information from.
There is no haptic connection to the incoming data, no personal connection to and no experience with the teacher, no flood control to prevent overwhelming of the destination receiver, i.e. the processing capacity of a child's brain.
A preschooler cannot process such a flood of abstract information, he/she is only capable to passive and uncontrolled reception, not to learning as a conscious mental process of analyzing, comparing, comprehending and utilizing. After reaching school maturity at around 6-7-8 years of age this slowly changes, but even then there is no point in online classes of more than 40 minutes.
4) The physical presence of a teacher is essential for emotional connection at this age, otherwise attention and bonding to the teacher cannot develop. To build a trusting teacher-student relationship, a young child needs to actually experience the sight and sound of the teacher, to experience the teacher as a person.
5) This is very much like language "learning" through cartoons, where we put our toddlers in front of the tv in the vain hope that they'll absorb what they hear. They won't. They might remember a recurring word or two, since fairy tales have a closed vocabulary, but that is far from knowledge.
This kind of visual input only superficially "scrapes" the cerebral cortex, dazzling sounds and flashing images do not reach deeper layers, are not processed as short-term memory in the hippocampus, and certainly will not consolidate as long-term memory in the neocortex and stored as pieces of knowledge which can be recalled and actually worked with.
For reliable language acqusition, repetition of new words/terms/linguistic structures is essential. Grammatical and sentence-building rules need to be solidified and integrated into everyday communication along with building up a soild vocabulary both in passive and active form. It is crucial to understand, internalise, utilize and then automate all of those at the same time co-ordinating and synchronizing very different skills.
In terms of language learning, cartoons can only help with listening comprehension, sensitizing our ears for the correct pronunciation by raising phonemic awareness to the sounds of a foreign language. But don't pressure and expect your 4-5-6 years old to learn German just because he has watched 5 episodes of Peppa pig in German.
As a practising mum, I'd like to say a few words about bilingual education for children. There is a lot of literature on this subject, which is obviously available on the internet, but I'd like to draw attention to a few technical terms. I use (Austrian) German alongside Hungarian on a daily basis,....
