From the linguistic viewpoint, learning a language is the development of assimilating the analytic and synthetic,
phonic (and possibly graphic) systems of the language, its stagnant structures (patterns), and the material foundations of these structures. Announcement can be maintained by means of two kinds of codes in relation to the category of substance, which they utilize. A speaker and a writer exploit the synthetic phonic system and the artificial graphic system, correspondingly. The listener and the reader use logical phonic and analytic graphic systems, correspondingly. Of the four systems, the logical phonic system is principal with reverence to the synthetic phonic system. This means that no one is able to speak without being able to understand. In other words, there is no capability to encode without a capability to decipher. Equally, phonic systems are in turn primary with deference to both graphic codes (within the graphic codes there exists the same priority of analytic over synthetic code, which results in a potential ability to read without being able to write, but not vice versa). The main concern of phonic codes involves that reading engrosses a transposition of graphic signs into phonic fundamentals, although the articulatory starting point is not activated (silent reading).
In sight of what has been said hitherto, we may differentiate four language skills based on the codes, which are correspondingly concerned. Hence listening involves the use of the logical phonic system. Speaking activates the artificial phonic system. Reading activates the analytic graphic system and involves its transposition to the phonic matter (without unavoidably activating the articulatory basis), and utilization of the analytic phonic system to decipher the message. Writing is an overturn development: the acoustic substance is transposed to the graphic substance; synthetic phonic system is used first, and after the transposition, the synthetic graphic code is applied.
The most favorable age to begin foreign language instruction is 8-15. There are various reasons to consider that beginning foreign language training at an earlier age leads to triumphant results. A younger child imitates supplementary straightforwardly, his speech centres are more bendable, there is less interference from any previous linguistic experience, and there is no self-consciousness. At the age of 8-15, the risk of interference increases significantly, but the habit of analyzing the phonic substance is motionless completely in existence as the most essential. Exhaustive schooling at the age of 8-15 may still effect in native-like command of a foreign language.
At this moment, we can characterize foreign language learning as the learning of any language in a situation when at any rate one other language has been already learned as native, i.e. when the phonic analytic system of the native language has been learned, and the learning of phonic synthetic system is well under way. For that reason, with respect to children below the age of six, it is barely probable to differentiate between foreign language and native language from the linguistic or psychological viewpoint, since neither language is fundamentally privileged. The dissimilarity, at this age, can be made on merely sociological grounds. When a new language is introduced after the age of six, the linguistic and psychological distinctions between the native language and the foreign language begin to make sense.
CHAPTER II
Teaching English as a foreign language to young learners.
1. An integrative approach to young learners.
Approach refers to a number of universal statements in relation to language itself and language schooling and learning from the linguistic, educational, and sociological points of view. Approach provides a hypothetical background for language teaching; it provides principles of ordering the material (on the level of method) and of actual teaching (on the level of techniques). The validity of the statement uttered on the level of approach is measured by the effectiveness of the methods (and techniques, one might add) that stalk from it. Otherwise, it is axiomatic, which means that its statements do not have to be proved hypothetically but they have to be correlated and free of interior contradictions