How the right circumstances and the need to communicate helped

I am going to tell you how a child learned English in a year’s stay in a strange place.

When I attended a one-year TESL (Teaching of English as a Secondary Language) in University Malaya, I met a married Chinese couple with their only child, a girl aged three years. They were from Penang Island. The husband was attending the same TESL course while the wife was a housewife. They decided to stay in Kuala Lumpur so that they could be with the man of the family.

They thought of a suitable place to lodge and while doing so, the idea of having their child learn English in this new place. However, they were not thinking of placing her in a kindergarten or a boarding school. They realized that their child forced by circumstances to communicate in another language would be able to take on the challenge and overcome any obstacles in her path, emerging with sufficient language skills to survive in such a situation.

With at least a parent nearby, the child would not feel neglected or lost in facing the problem of having to communicate in another language.

How can such a situation be arranged? They determined to search for an English speaking family with no Chinese Language proficiency. With some effort, they did find an Indian family who speaks mostly English with hardly any Tamil language used.
They managed to rent a room there and stayed for a year. The Chinese girl had to listen to and talk to the Indian couple and their children in English. The girl’s mother gave her child lots of opportunity to play with the Indian children.

Soon, a year was over and the little Chinese girl had mastered sufficient English Language to talk, joke, scold and complain about her friends to their parents during the various situations that arise from time to time.

The right circumstances and the need to communicate are strong motivating forces in language learning.