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Excerpt from by Linda Wacyk, Partnership from Learning
Spend a half-hour with visiting European teen-agers and very quickly you'll learn two things: they love to shop in American malls and they can beat almost any American student at speaking and understanding a second language.
Mostly, that's because they learn to speak English early--usually in late elementary years--and they practice as often as they can. They also understand that learning a second language is critical to their ability to work, travel and succeed in our increasingly global world. Americans, on the other hand, too often fail to understand the value that comes from learning a second language and the culture of the people who speak it.
"Americans for many years have held a self-centered belief that everyone should learn from us and follow our ways," said Dave Goldberg, from the Modern Language Association. His association works hard to change that attitude and to encourage more students to learn a second world language and to start early.
Why the push to learn a second language early?
In 1989 President George Bush met with America's governors for an education summit that would shape American education for years to come. The result of that meeting was America 2000: An Educational Strategy, which laid out a plan to improve learning in our nation's schools. One of these "Goals 2000," as they are better known, calls for improved language instruction at all levels. Goals 2000 also encourages schools to develop a plan for foreign language instruction that stretches from Kindergarten through grade 12.
This goal fits very nicely with new research that suggests children have a "window of opportunity" to learn a second language, starting at 1 year of age. In fact, research suggests that all babies are born with the ability to hear and reproduce every sound of every language. By six months, they are able to begin to learn their native language. With each year of growth, however, children lose this ability. And after the age of 10 or 12, it's nearly impossible to learn to speak a second language without an accent.
Other research shows that children who study a foreign language in elementary school:
4 Score higher on standardized tests in reading, language arts, and mathematics;
4 Show more mental flexibility, creativity, divergent thinking and higher-order thinking
skills;
4 Feel better about themselves and their learning; and
4 Learn more easily when they study foreign languages in high school and college.
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