How young is too young?
The Prague Daily Monitor reports that Czech babies as young as 14 months are having English classes in 10 cities across the Czech Republic, with plans to introduce classes for even younger students. The youngsters attend a 30 minute class once a week, where they listen to simple English songs and memorise words and expressions in the form of a game. The aim is for the students to learn English as their second mother tongue.
How young is too young? Should more countries follow this example and introduce language classes for babies? If so, how far should this go? In this article, Marco MacFarlane discusses the problems that immersion teaching (teaching learners exclusively in English) can cause in children who have not yet mastered their mother tongue. He talks about te condition known as “subtractive bilingualism”, in which the first language is “actually eroded by the learning of the second, and both languages remain relatively underdeveloped”.
What do you think? Post a comment below…
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December 6th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
The earlier the better. As for problems associated with mastering L1 first, many bilingual children, perhaps with parents speaking different languages at home, are able to distinguish between the two languages without any problem. The owner of a school where I once worked brought up her son in the US - he has no L1 problems and can now speak English fluently, giving him an incredible advantage in today’s world.
December 6th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
If everyone did this, we’d all be out of a job.
December 7th, 2006 at 3:01 am
I went to a school where you start learning German at like 3 years old. German has stuck with me throughout my life. I think nothing bad can come out of learning another language very young; it’s the ideal way to learn a language!
December 7th, 2006 at 6:09 am
The younger the better indeed. My children were taught English and Arabic at home from birth. At the age of 3, they began to attend Hebrew speaking kindergarten and within 2-3 months were conversing in Hebrew as well. Today they are perfectly fluent in all three languages. Occasionally there was a word they didn’t know in one language and would use the word from another language but there was never any true confusion.
December 7th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Perhaps there is a difference between bilingual language acquisition in the home, from parents whom the babies love, and whom the parents love, and bilingual ‘professional’ linguistic acquisition in institutions away from home.
I could imagine the confusions regarding L1 being more likely if the second langauge was not learnt at home.
Just my intuitive guess.
December 10th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
While I think language learning at a young age is a great benefit, I don’t think one class for 30 minutes once a week is going to make the students bilingual.
However, if the parents can speak English to and with their children, that would be a different story. In fact, if the parents speak English, are classes necessary at all?