Education and Jobs Blog

If the story in general is fact or fiction isn’t the salient point to consider here: what is true is that today there are between five and $ 6000 different languages spoken all over the world, and that not being able to communicate in each other’s languages can certainly cause mass confusion and, at least, an erosion of excellent will between different cultures.

Being able to speak another person’s language is really a critical skill, especially as increased travel opportunities, satellite programming, and international technique internet have started to produce a truly global community. But when is the greatest time for you to begin learning a foreign language? Many experts would say the sooner the greater, and in fact, there has been numerous studies and reports, some dating back the 1960s, indicating that the ideal time for you to begin studying a foreign language is within elementary school.

There are many benefits to starting a foreign language at an elementary school level. Children for the reason that age bracket who study an overseas language have been shown to have greater mental flexibility, creativity, divergent thinking skills, and higher-order thinking skills, as well as improved listening skills and memories. Some would say these are advantages of studying an overseas language at any age, not only in elementary school-so why start that early if the same benefits could be gained equally well by starting in, say, junior high? Strictly from a logical perspective, beginning a foreign language earlier allows for an extended sequence of instruction, increasing the likelihood that a child would achieve true proficiency inside a language. In other words, if your child doesn’t start studying a language until freshman year, they might have only the opportunity to study a language for four years before graduating, and that’s not necessarily enough to ensure true proficiency. (Some experts maintain that a the least six to eight years of study is required before even approaching profiency.) If a child starts 4 years earlier, she or he has the opportunity to master the complex grammar structures and achieve true proficiency in a manner that is merely difficult in a four-year program.

Jean Piaget, the renowned developmental psychologist, put forth another arguments for beginning study regarding a foreign language at an early age: for one thing, children, developmentally speaking, tend to be more open-minded in general in elementary school than they’re at a later age. They are more interested in learning about the world around them and much more excited about different cultures; this can help lead to a better, tolerant attitude, particularly toward the culture and country whose language they study.

Piaget also had a theory of cognitive development which supports this push to have an early start. He felt that after a child is faced with a concept or an experience that does not squeeze into his or her arena of understanding, it becomes a catalyst for new thinking. In other words, as everything about a foreign language or culture doesn’t, at first, fit into a child’s “realm of understanding”, the whole study of the language serves as a catalyst for new thinking.

Back in the 1960s, the noted linguist, Noam Chomsky, help with his own theory about the requirement for starting foreign language studies earlier, proposing the existence within the human brain of the “language acquisition device” which enabled humans to understand languages easily up to and including certain age (usually related to the onset of puberty). Once that age was reached, he theorized, learning could still occur, however with significantly greater difficulty and much less probability of achieving a local level of fluency. Later studies built upon Chomsky’s theory, developing it into the “Critical Period Hypothesis”.

Linguists and researchers still debate the validity of those two theories, but regardless, there are clearly benefits to beginning study regarding an overseas language while very young, and, even though U.S. does not mandate study of a language, a number of other schools around the world do. In a study conducted through the Center for Applied Linguistics back in 2001, researchers discovered that most of the countries in the study had widespread or mandatory language requirements for college students by the chronilogical age of eight; other countries introduced foreign language through the upper elementary grades at least, and many offered, or even required, the study of another language too. By comparison, nearly all U.S. students don’t even begin studying an initial language until the chronilogical age of fourteen.

There have been many reasons cited as to the gap between early and mandatory language study within the U.S. and in other countries, which range from limited funds, a lack of qualified teachers, the have to shelve non-essential classes in favor of ramping up time spent in “critical” subjects such as mathematics, science, and literacy. No one disputes that those are critical subjects, but it will be a grievous mistake, within our ever-shrinking world, and also at a period when we need so desperately to be able to communicate efficiently and fluently using the world around us, to consider that languages aren’t any less critical subjects. Children will require math and science to achieve the knowledge to construct that tower, but with no capability to contact others of different tongues and cultures, they will never be able to construct it together-or, when they do, they might be doomed, such as the men of Babel, to view it fall because of an inability to speak each other’s languages.