What are some effective methods for teaching English to infants and young children?
Well, babies who grow up with native English-speaking parents will just pick it up from interacting with family. So I’m assuming you refer to learning English as a foreign language, where the child’s parents speak something else in the home. Until age seven or thereabouts, children have an innate capacity for language. As long as they receive systematic exposure to a language, they will figure out how it works and speak it relatively fluently. Seven is called the “critical age”. After that, you lose some of that language ability and need to be “taught” foreign languages, whether by more carefully structured immersion, classes, ESL/bilingual education programs, etc. In general, the younger you are the easier it is to pick up a language. That isn’t to say that there aren’t individual adults who are particularly gifted linguists, or that you can’t become proficient through lots of hard work, but in general it is only children who can easily become fluent and learn to speak without an acce
