Earlier Is Better

UNIVERSITY OF JUBA COLLEGE OF EDUCATION ENGLISH LANGUAGE DEPARTMENT MASTER PROGRAM

Assignment:

EARLIE IS BETTER Presented by : Has san A/Rhman Ali

Course: Psycholinguistics

Supervisor : Dr: Amna Badri Date: 10/8/2009

The "window of opportunity" idea is widely accepted. Here is a very simplified explanation: From birth until puberty, the brain literally formats itself to perform various specialized functions, such as language, based upon the input it gets from the world. Neural networks gradually form, and they function more and more efficiently as they are used. If a second language is part of that input, networks for understanding and using it grow richer. Therefore, early exposure to a second language actually causes more connections to grow in a child's brain, and those connections, in turn, allow for easier additional learning in the second and first languages. This "formatting" process, especially active in the first six years, ends at puberty, or around age 12, and the brain begins to shed connections it no longer uses. The capacity to distinguish and make sounds not encountered in languages the child speaks diminishes or disappears. Many scientists believe that a newborn's brain is genetically "programmed" to learn language, just as a bird is programmed to sing or a spider to weave a web. No one actually teaches a child to talk. Rather, parents and others enable her learning by speaking while they interact with her. The interaction is a critical part of this process; merely hearing TV or radio is not enough by itself. Baby talk by adults is part of this interaction. It involves simple sentence structure and vocabulary, exaggerated intonation and sounds, repetition, and questions, all of which help a child sort out meanings, sounds, and sentence patterns of a language.

During this early period, two languages can be learned simultaneously as long as the child regularly interacts with speakers of both languages. Pronunciation is more like that of a native speaker when language study begins early. Some experts believe this is due in part to physiological changes at puberty; by age 15, a child's facial muscles and bones are nearly mature, and his musculature loses sensitivity to phonetic distinctions that are not relevant to the languages he speaks. It is simply harder for the older student to make new, unfamiliar sounds. A psychological factor may also be at work: Older children are more inhibited in trying out new sounds and more concerned about making mistakes. "A child taught a second language after the age of 10 or so is unlikely ever to speak it like a native," said a February 1996 Newsweek article. Through extensive research it has been proven that the earlier a child is introduced to a second language the greater the chances are that this child will master both languages. A number of experts attribute this mastery to physiological changes that occur in the maturing brain as a child enters puberty. If you, as a parent, truly want your child to have a greater understanding of the English language and to do better in school, then start teaching your children a foreign language now. Studies have shown that native English speakers who study a foreign language when young do not fall behind in their native language development. In fact, children enrolled in foreign language programs score statistically higher on standardized tests conducted in English. A number of reports have demonstrated that children who have learned a second language earn higher SAT scores, particularly on the verbal section of the test. One study showed that by the fifth year

of an immersion program students outperform all comparison groups and remain high academic achievers throughout their schooling. There are many benefits that a child and a parent receive through the study of a new language. A foreign language opens a whole new cultural world to your child. Your child will be able to express himself in new, profound ways. And knowing a second language will give your child a competitive edge when entering the workforce. Professionals who speak a second language are called on to travel and exchange information with people in other countries throughout their careers. Knowing more than one language enhances opportunities in government, business, medicine and health care, law enforcement, teaching, technology, the military, communications, industry, social service, and marketing. An employer will see you as a bridge to new clients or customers if you know a second language. The key to helping your child learn a new language is to become actively involved yourself. Take your child to cultural events that feature music, dance, or food from the country that they are learning about. Learn the language yourself. Help motivate your child by learning beside him; working together on language-learning exercises is time well spent. If possible, surround your children with books, videos, TV programs and software in the target second language to help them learn. Teaching your children a second language will provide them with the skills to succeed in the future, and the process can be an enjoyable project for families. Even if your children are no longer under age 10, learning a second language is a valuable skill at any age, so start sooner rather than later.

Puberty may be the time of many new beginnings independence, physical changes, social experimentation but it also marks the end of a child's window of opportunity for easily acquiring additional languages. (Some parents insist that adolescence also means the end of English communication itself but that's a subject for a whole other article.) It is now well established that young children tend to absorb relatively easily any language that they are surrounded by, and they appear to learn to speak a new language more easily than adults do. Compared to an older student, a child’s language learning advantage is greatest in the area of pronunciation, somewhat weaker in the area of grammar usage, and slight when considering the size of their vocabulary. Still, the apparent overall benefit of early learning is leading many to implement foreign language programs in elementary school or even earlier. Is this the best or even an advisable use of resources, especially children’s time? The answer depends on what you want to achieve and how much you are willing to invest. A few hours a week of foreign language instruction focusing on learning words, songs, and a few ritualized exchanges is good for cultural exposure and appreciation, but do not expect real mastery. The implication of the research is not so much that one should start language teaching early — say, age 6 — and expect spectacular results, but rather that the teaching should be age appropriate. When considering the “earlier is better” approach, these points often are overlooked: •

A young child tends to absorb a language through massive amounts of input and exposure, while explicit learning,

involving rules and systematic practice, plays an important role for adolescents and adults. • The impact of age of learning on ultimate proficiency is not always clear cut; in other words, some child learners end up with accents and incomplete second language grammars, and some adult learners become, for all practical purposes, as skilled as native speakers. • While young learners are more likely than older students to ultimately speak a new language like native speakers, adolescents and adults actually learn foreign languages faster. If proficiency is the goal, teaching young children a foreign language in an age-appropriate manner means providing a full-immersion education, taught by teachers who know the language well. Such programs simulate the environment of growing up with a language by: • Integrating the second language with instruction in other subjects; • Giving learner's ample opportunities to engage in meaningful discourse with other students and teachers using the foreign language; •

Exposing learners to a variety of native speakers of the target language; and

• Focusing instruction on attaining the language skills needed for communicating about and understanding academic subject matter, not on mastering a foreign language for its own sake. Some parents and teachers may be concerned that total immersion in a foreign language could impede a child’s grasp of English and ability to learn other subjects. However, studies have

shown that, while there can be an initial lag in English achievement, full immersion students catch up, scoring at least as well as other students on verbal and mathematics skills. They may even exceed monolingual children on some measures of cognitive processing. For young children, starting early can lead to mastery of a foreign language — with no long-term detriment to their grasp of English — only if it is taught through a well-developed form of total immersion instruction. A program consisting of a few hours of foreign language teaching per week is not enough. Older students and adults, on the other hand, need a judicious mixture of practice and communication. Deliberate direct instruction (e.g., studying grammatical structures, memorizing lists of vocabulary words) is vital, along with ample classroom and study time. As such students progress, their instruction should become increasingly communicative and should include an extended stay abroad for greatest effect. Lenneberg (1967) hypothesized that language could be acquired only within a critical period, extending from early infancy until puberty. In its basic form, the critical period hypothesis need only have consequences for first language acquisition. Nevertheless, it is essential to our understanding of the nature of the hypothesized critical period to determine whether or not it extends as well to second language acquisition. If so, it should be the case that young children are better second language learners than adults and should consequently reach higher levels of final proficiency in the second language. This prediction was tested by comparing the English proficiency attained by 46 native Korean or Chinese speakers who had arrived in the United States between the ages of 3 and 39, and who had lived in the United States between 3 and 26 years by the

time of testing. These subjects were tested on a wide variety of structures of English grammar, using a grammaticality judgment task. Both correlation and t-test analyses demonstrated a clear and strong advantage for earlier arrivals over the later arrivals. Test performance was linearly related to age of arrival up to puberty; after puberty, performance was low but highly variable and unrelated to age of arrival. This age effect was shown not to be an inadvertent result of differences in amount of experience with English, motivation, selfconsciousness, or American identification. The effect also appeared on every grammatical structure tested, although the structures varied markedly in the degree to which they were well mastered by later learners. The results support the conclusion that a critical period for language acquisition extends its effects to second language acquisition.

References: 1. Eric Heinz Lenneberg "The Capacity of Language Acquisition," 2. Internet.