Case study into a 5-year-old’s experience of short-term intensive home-based sequential monolingual English immersion with Chinese parents

Abstract

The case study researched the impact of home-based English language immersion on a 5-year-old Chinese girl named Jane (pseudonym) who studied in Grade 3 of a public kindergarten in suburban Shanghai but had not been previously engaged with or learned English. The study focuses on the girl’s experience during the period in which her Chinese parents subjected her to a three-month intensive home-based English interactional immersion. During this time her parents provided her with English book reading, English cartoon watching and daily conversation in English. These three aspects of the immersion experience were supplemented with pedagogical strategies to intentionally promote the child’s L2 development. To provide a clearer picture of the background context, the researcher also used questionnaires and interviews to survey the attitudes and strategies toward their Children’s English learning of the parents whose children attended Jane’s kindergarten. The study attempts to contribute to the field by adding to what little is currently known about the English learning immersion experience of young learners taught at home by their parents in a Mainland Chinese context. The findings suggest that the public kindergarten parents in suburban Shanghai tend to stick to an “the earlier the better” rationale by involving their children in English learning and using various strategies accordingly. The study also finds the application of a combination of the English conversation and pedagogical strategies in a home-based context is effective in improving the EFL children’s English development in terms of lexicon and syntax.