The effect of short stories on vocabulary teaching to very young learners (Aged 3-4 years): A suggested common syllabus

As English is the most popular foreign language all over world, nowadays it is known that it should be learnt in an effective way. Therefore, teaching English has gained importance not only for adults but also for children. It is a real that learning starts in infancy and it continues through early childhood. For this reason, it can be claimed that teaching a foreign language should be started as early as possible for a successful learning process. But in Turkey, there is not any curriculum or syllabus purposefully designed for foreign language teaching to very young learners. So, in this study, it is aimed to develop a syllabus for teaching vocabulary in English language to very young learners through the short story-based sample syllabus. The research questions posed for this study investigated to how very young learners can learn English effectively through and how it can be permanent for them. Hence, this study was carried out in `Neşeli Adımlar? Preschool in Ankara, Turkey and the participants of the study were 28 preschoolers aged 3-4. Children at the same age were chosen randomly for the study and they were classified into two groups as experiment group and control group at the beginning of the study. As reviewing the literature, first, the needs and interests of the children were determined and some short stories were written for very young learners. The same vocabulary items were chosen teach in the same period (7 weeks). The units designed with the short stories were used for experiment group; the children in control group also had English course, but in their courses there were not any kinds of short story or short story-based activities. As a data collection instrument, an observation checklist designed for the children was used in order to determine the effectiveness of the short story-based syllabus. To analyze the permanence of the syllabus, two other observations were conducted after the study and the results were compared. Within this perspective, it can be suggested that the children in the experiment group were more motivated and involved in the English courses. Additionally, the results of the permanence observations showed that children in experiment group could remember more vocabulary items than the others since they learned them in a meaningful context. As a result of these findings, a short story-based common syllabus designed for very young learners was suggested at the end of the study.