BELIEFS ON LANGUAGE LEARNING

Diary entry #3

When talking about language learning, there are some myths or widespread beliefs amongst society about what is the best way of achieving a good level of a foreign language, and the main ones are all related to its early introduction.

Over the last years, the belief that kids should start learning a foreign language as soon as possible has been supported by many parents and also by many educators. But, how real is that assumption?

First of all, we need to distinguish the traditional or formal settings in which languages are taught at schools from the natural method by which we acquire our first language.

When we are born, we receive a massive and constant input of our mother tongue. We are totally immersed in it and that is why in the long term we achieve a level of proficiency in that specific language with high levels of phonetics and pronunciation. However, the way we learn a foreign language at school is entirely different.

To begin with, the input of that foreign language is limited and extremely reduced in comparison to the one of our mother tongue and, besides, schools tend to focus on the grammatical aspects of the language instead of teaching it in a truly communicative way.

The schools way of teaching foreign languages requires a high level of maturity and cognitive strategies which young children lack. When kids are older, their brain is more structured and it allows them to make interconnections between concepts, to find synonyms and even to relate languages because their level of their mother tongue is also higher. It is then when they can understand and learn grammatical rules as well as better perform at written tests, since they own more learning skills.

Therefore, it is true that to achieve a proficient level of a language, the sooner we start the better, but this statement only applies to naturalistic methods where we achieve foreign languages as we did with our mother tongue. Children may be like sponges if they learn languages in a natural way because they are curious and prompt to take risks and the high input or exposure to the language makes learning easier, but this early introduction will never work within the formal settings of school teachings because they don’t have the resources to progress as it is commonly expected.

Another assumption about the benefits of starting early is the factor of motivation. People believe that young kids are more motivated, but that is not true. As time goes by, the elements that stimulate students tend to change but it doesn’t mean that they become discouraged about learning. Preschool and primary students may be aroused by games, songs and stories but teenage students are more aware of the importance of foreign languages and the opportunities they bring, such as travelling and meeting new people, and those perspectives can really inspire them to keep working hard. Motivation may change, but it doesn’t disappear.

Last but not least, we find a preoccupation amongst some parent that an early introduction of a foreign language might negatively affect the native language (or languages, in cases like Cataluña or the Basque country) of their children, but that worry is absolutely irrational because no studies have given prove of the existence of that issue.

Firstly, the mother tongue is constantly present on a child’s life wherever they go which makes it impossible for the language to be forgotten or ignored. Moreover, research has been carried out about this topic and several studies have shown that bilingual children actually achieve higher scores in addition to many other benefits. Bilingualism allows people to concentrate more easily in problem-solving tasks, improves memory skills and has proven to delay the symptoms of dementia, but the list goes on and on.

Consequently, we can state that the early introduction of a foreign language can definitely be positive especially in natural circumstances, although not so much in the formal environments of schools. It is essential to keep bilingualism at schools because it brings countless advantages to the children but starting too early in those contexts doesn’t necessarily lead to a higher proficiency level of the language since kids need some specific strategies to learn it, strategies that they will not obtain until they reach a certain age.