Learning Activities Activating Kindergartners to Learn to Speak English in an EFL Indonesian Setting

Abstract

The study tries to investigate what learning activities activating kindergartners to learn to speak English and to describe the language producion. It involves four kindergartners from different schools. The data were collected through observations and interviews and then analysed by constant comparisons. The findings revealed there were four commonalities of the learning activities, namely, (1) answering questions in English; (2) listening to a model speaking English; (3) imitating, and (4) repeating the English utterances. Among the four, answering questions was the most frequent way. Meanwhile, the language production varied covering single word utterances, verb phrases, simple sentences (S+V+O) or (S+V+O+Adv.)in simple present tense, and exclamation. The proposition generated from the present study is that kindergartners will learn to speak English if they are often asked questions in English which they understand and are engaged in an interaction in English where they need to listen, imitate, and repeat.