Should children start learning a foreign language early
Nowadays, some may hold the opinion that children should begin learning a foreign language as soon as they start school, but others have a negative attitude that learning a foreign language early will pose too much pressure on kids and will affect their mother-tongue learning. As far as I am concerned, I agree that bilingual education should start as early as possible. My arguments for this point are listed as follows.
I agree with the statement without reservation since children learn second languages quickly than adults. As we have observed, children can learn languages faster than adults; immigrant children translate for their parents. Child learners speak without a foreign accent, whereas this is impossible for adult learners. Therefore the earlier kids learn a second language, the less difficulties they would meet when they grow up and have to face a foreign language-speaking environment.
Another reason why I agree with the above statement is that I believe that bilingual education can be fun and stimulate children’s learning interest. Many parents and teachers know how to teach kids a second language in an interesting way. One of my students told me that, when he was in kindergarten, every day his mum taught him a few native language characters as well as their meaning in English. As time passed, the kid became keen to learn English. Sometimes he gave his mum and dad a quiz by speaking some English words and asking them what the meanings are.
Bilingual education will not affect the mother-tongue study of children. As we are living in an environment of pure native language conversations and traditional culture, it is impossible for us to give up our culture and language. Teachers also are trying to arrange the curriculum in a appropriate way. For instance, they create an English-speaking environment for children in the morning, and a native language-speaking environment in the afternoon.
Bilingual education has become a trend. No matter we like it or not, future educational undertakings will become more international, and exchanges between schools throughout the world will increase. Given this, speaking a common language is important and, to this purpose, bilingual teaching is an inevitable way.
