When Second Language Training Should Begin?

From the Mouths of Babes

Language specialists believe second language training should begin early

The time when a little restaurant menu French was all the foreing language skill that most Americans assumed they needed has gone the way of the gold standard and a strong dollar. Today foreign language ability is increasingly important in the global economy, and in many American cities you can go for hours without hearing English spoken. But U.S. Scholars lag far behind international counterparts in requiring foreign language training. Starting when a child is young is critical, argue many experts.

At what age is a child best suited to learn a second language?

There is a cut-off age around puberty. After 12 or 13, it is very difficult to learn a language and to be able to speak it like a native speaker and develop a high level of fluency. Some studies comparting 2nd-grade learners with 8th-grade learners have found that eigths graders learn more quickly and can do more grammar than the 2nd graders can. The older students are more thorough learners.

That would be the case with any subject area. But young kids like playing with language, they like making new sounds. They're not inhibited or embarrassed by making strange sounds, so it's ideal for them to learn a foreign language. If you wait until kids are in adolescence, they are very inhibited and very worried about how they appear to their parents.

What sort of second language programs are available for young children?

Ideally, if one of the parents is bilingual, or if you live in a neighborhood where more than one language is spoken or if you have a baby sitter that speaks another language, then the child can be exposed to another language in an early age. But for the majority of kids in the United States that's not the case.

Typically, schools don't start foreign language teaching until about middle school or high school, but about a fifth of the elementary schools teach some type of foreign language, either before or after school, or during the school day. It could be just an introduction or it could be an immersion experience. The successful programs are integrated into the school day so that everybody sees foreign language as part of the curriculum, not as some add-on that you only do if you have some extra time.

Does an immersion program require a special school?

No, but it requires a special program. Many public schools in the United States have implemented immersion programs: both partial immersion, where 50 percent of the day is in the foreign language, and total immersion, which starts out with 100 percent of the day in kindergarten and the first day.

Second Language Training Is Always Useful. Photo by Elena

Do kids lag behind in their English when they spend all their time learning another language?

That is the most commonly asked question by parents - “What happens to their English?” - and it is a very reasonable question. Children in immersion programs are taught the regular school curriculum and they have to take all the standardized that the other kids take in English. By the time they get to 5th or 6th grade, they score as well or better in English than their peers who have been studying only in English. Studying another language helps you learn more about your native language. All of the research results show that it actually enhances your native language abilities. Immersion students score especially high in English vocabulary and reading comprehension, even though they have gotten very little direct English instruction.

Are there any other approaches to teaching a child a second language?

Besides the immersion model, there is the traditional foreign language in elelementary schools approach (FLES). Those programs have different goal, but most often their aim is to enable the child to speak about specific things relating to their school, their family, their friends, the weather – really basic things.

More and more though, these types of programs are learning from the immersion methodology and are starting to teach content from the regular curriculum. A third model is called foreign language experience, or FLEX, and that is where the children receive a smattering of four or five different languages. They are just introduced to the language and may be a few basic phrases and some tidbits about the culture. It's supposed to expose the children to language in general and a few specific languages in particular so that when they go on to junior high or high school,, they will know what they want to study in depth.

What if the school has no program? Are language tapes  at all effective?

Listening to songs in different languages is fun for kids, but they are not going to learn to speak the language. What I would do myself if I had a child would be to find somebody in the neighborhood who spoke a different language, a child my child's age, and I would get them to play together. Kids learn so much from each other.

If a parent speaks the language that the child is learning, should the parent use it at home with the child?

There are some experts who say that when your child comes home from school, don't say « speak to me in Spanish ». Especially at the beginning stage of learning learning when the child is just going through a period where he's just supposed to be working on listening comprehension.

Are there any problems with language confusion?

Not at all? In general children can learn five or six different languages. In fact, children in many other countries do learn five or six languages at once.

The important thing is to separate the languages for the kids. If the mother speaks English, for example, and the father speaks Spanish, they should try as much as possible to keep those roles the same so that the child will see that there are two separate languages.

The top 10 tongues

The languages spoken most frequently at homes around the world :

Mandarin Chinese

English

Spanish

Arabic

Bengali

Hindi and Urdu (some language, different alphabet)

Portuguese

Russian

Japanese

German