Benefits of English for Preschool Children. The Case Study of a Bilingual School in Italy

Abstract

The research aims at investigating the communicative abilities of Italian children in a bilingual (English-Italian) preschool, focusing on the benefits of bilingualism in children’s cognitive, social, and cultural growth. After an introduction on the role of bilingual education in early childhood in promoting a child’s life-long love of language and bilingual proficiency, through the support of some European documents and key studies in the field, the research design is presented. A variety of instruments were used, such as video recorded class observations, field notes and observation sheets, semi-structured interviews with L1 and L2 teachers and structured interviews with children, questionnaires for parents, as well as language knowledge tests for children and teachers. Children’s lexicon development was taken into consideration, especially the frequency of use of English language, thus showing a significant growth of the perceptive and productive lexicon for the investigated age range. This provided evidence that the children in this study were still at the sensitive age for lexicon acquisition. The linguistic phenomena that, among the preschool children, were practised the most were: code-switching and code-mixing. This study provided new findings on the early acquisition of English language in bilingual children with the home language Italian. This language experience usually takes place along five dimensions: the materiality of language and its use, children’s perceptions about them, beliefs about self and others in the speech community, emotional responses about language and about language users.