Question:
I have some questions here. Hope someone can help me out here! Thank
you so much! I ever heard that it is better for children to learn other
languages in their early age and we have to stimulate children’s
learning potential in a critical period. So I wonder what age will be
the best time for children to learn the second language and what age
period is the critical learning time toward human development?
Answer:
The claim that children best learn a second language in their early age is
largely a myth, but it depends on why and how they are learning the language,
and what you mean by "best".
Here is the case for young kids being best:
When kids are young, they seem to learn languages easily, and without study.
especially as compared with adults, who may struggle with foreign language
study for years and never acquire the language.
Young kids acquire a native accent, often without trying. Adults often
cannot acquire a native accent.
Young children may learn languages more easily because they are not
self-conscious about language use. Adults are more likely to be afraid of
making a mistake, and to hold back unless they are sure that they are
correct.
Adults are less likely to be able to fully immerse themselves in learning a
language unless they indeed enter into full-time study. The distractions of
adult responsibilities, and the demands on adult time are much greater than
those for children.
Here is the case for young kids NOT being best:
A 6 year old learning a language is only acquiring it at a 6-year-old level.
The language of 6 year olds is much easier than the language of adults,
needing and using much less vocabulary (which is the most time consuming part
of language study), and little nuance and connotation. Thus a 6 year old may
sound as good as another 6 year old, and we say he speaks the language well;
but if an adult spoke the language like a 6 year old did, we would say he
doesn't speak well at all. The 6 year old will be able to communicate with
other 6 year olds, and probably with most adults as well as a 6 year old
typically does, but the adult will be able to communicate only with 6 year
olds, and to talk with other adults like a 6 year old does. (I adopted a 5
and a 6 year old from Russia, and could speak to them in the language within
a few months. I never could carry on conversations with Russian adults,
however, unless they slowed down and simplified their language as if they
were speaking to a child.)
A 6 year old who learns a language and who then does not continue to practice
that language will have gained no useful skill, and will lose the language
that they have learned. If a child studies Chinese, and never has any need
for Chinese after the class is completed, why bother? If as an adult, she
instead needs to know German, her childhood experience in knowing Chinese
will be largely irrelevant to her learning German. Since we have no way of
knowing what language an American child will find useful as an adult, we do
not know WHICH language they should acquire when it is "easy".
Only if they live in or near a community which has significant use of the
language all the time while growing up, or if they continue their studies
throughout their school years, with a child who has learned Chinese as a
child be able to speak it as an adult. Thus, while a child might
theoretically be better at the language after a year than an adult would, the
child would have to study for 12 years to know it as an adult as well as the
adult would after a year, because if the child stops studying the language,
it will be lost. (My adopted kids stopped speaking Russian about a year
after they reached the US, though they understood Russian spoken to them for
a couple years thereafter. As a teenager, my daughter wishes to relearn her
native language. She may have a little easier time than someone who has
never seen the language, but she is no more certain to learn the language
than a studious non-speaker.)
The benefit to children is almost certainly keyed ONLY to pronunciation and
accent. Studies of ESL kids have found that native speakers of other
language placed in an English speaking school will typically take only 18-24
months to be fluent in conversation with their peers on the playground, but
they will take 5 to 7 years to become so skilled in the language that they
achieve parity on academic standardized tests with native speakers. If they
came to this country between the ages of 4 and 6 (typically the age when most
people advocate starting a child on a second language), then for some reason,
that adaptation extends to require 7 to 11 years to achieve parity. This may
or may not mean that this is the WORST time for a child to learn a foreign
language, if the desire is to achieve native skill.
While young kids are taking 2 years to become conversationally fluent, and
much longer to achieve academic parity, college students come to this country
to study, and while not ever becoming conversationally native-fluent, they
achieve academic parity and even superiority over their English-native peers
in as little as a year or two. This suggests that adults are better at
learning those portions of a language that they NEED to know for a specific
purpose, and they learn to read and to understand adult language use faster
than kids do, even if they are slower to learn to speak the language.
The systematic and conceptual study of a language, in the manner that adults
use to acquire a foreign language, can be applied over and over again to
learning more languages after the second one, and also provides additional
conceptual foundation for understanding the structure of English.
Some brief notes on child learning in the teens:
Most Americans who study foreign language start to do so in high school or
middle school taking their first class at that age. Without the wide ranging
evidence of the above, I feel that as it is done, this is largely a waste.
My statements here are, however, more opinion and argument than factually
supported.
The teen years are AFTER the critical years when the early childhood learning
advantages cited above apply - teens learn languages as well (or as poorly)
as do adults.
The Defense Department's Defense Language Institute, in teaching language to
people who will use those languages professionally, spends between 500 and
1500 classroom hours (depending on the language) (16 to 50 weeks of full
time, 30 hour per week classes with homework) to get the students to a usable
level of the language. A high school student, taking a class that meets for
one period daily, gets approximately 170 hours of study in a year, and then
takes a break for a couple of months during which time some of that study is
forgotten. (College students generally are expected to spend hours in
homework and language lab, and thus may double the hours of study per year).
It thus would take between 3 and 9 years of study for good students to
acquire adult skill in a language, not counting the losses during summer.
Thus only the easiest languages to acquire are CAPABLE of being effectively
studied, if the student will only study it in high school (which is the
norm), and even then requires 3 years to have the language be usable, and few
students take that much.
This could perhaps be remedied by a) starting language study earlier (but
this conflicts with other academics) b) studying languages more intensively
(my own approach to this would be to have a 2 week period at the end of a
school year in which the entire day would be spent in the language that has
been studied, or better yet, an immersion camp for 1-2 weeks of 24 hour a day
language immersion. This would double the time spent in the language per
year and provide the intensity needed for rapid learning) or c) not teaching
specific languages at all, but soundly introducing kids into the principles
of linguistics and the methods of self-study of a foreign language, focussing
on reading skills that do not require a class, and listening skills that can
be practiced by watching foreign movies.
Conclusions:
If there is reason to know that a child will need or want a particular
language as an adult, and there is a continuing opportunity to grow in that
language all the way to adulthood, then there probably is value in starting
to learn that language while young. If these conditions do not apply, then
child language study may be largely wasted.
There are ways to make language study productive in the later school years,
but unless these ways are used, that language study will not be time- or
cost-effective.
College study, and intensive immersive study in adults or near adults is
SUFFICIENTLY effective for language learning, but is not generally practiced
in the way needed to offer this to most students.
Note:
If you look at how music is taught, you will find many of the same things
true in music study as in language study. The prodigy who starts music study
early and continues to adulthood will be superior to most others. The kids
who studied a couple years as a child will likely have no skill as an adult,
and won't relearn the forgotten skills all that easily unless they practiced
very diligently when young. The typical student who starts at the middle
school years or even high school years and works until adulthood has a more
difficult period starting than the young student, but progresses rapidly once
they get the basic methods of music study down, and usually can achieve
parity with all but the most exceptional of child prodigies in much less
time. If the student starting at the high school level has had a good
general music education while younger (such as the Orff program), they will
learn a specific instrument much more quickly and effectively, and those who
do not study an instrument will still carry useful understanding of music to
adulthood.
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