Language learning
I was watching the news on Five on Monday evening and was thrilled to see that the Government is FINALLY bringing modern language learning to primary schools across the UK. All children in UK schools will learn a language from the age of 7 and the new scheme should be brought into place by 2010, in sync with the next overhaul of the school curriculum.
However, I was a bit disappointed to see that they haven’t done a u-turn on language learning at GCSE level - apparently, it’s still optional and not compulsory. Hopefully they will see sense and make it compulsory again.
While this new initiative is a start, second language learning should really be started as soon as possible. Linguist Noam Chomsky came up with the Universal Grammar theory, which hypothesises that all babies are born having an innate knowledge of the basic grammatical structure common to all human languages.
One of his later theories - the Principles and Parameters (P&P) theory - states that grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world’s languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain, like switches in the brain. Receive your data input - a language - figure out the rules, and set the switches in the brain for that particular language. For example, English always requires an explicit subject, but Spanish does not. A baby who grows up listening to English will put the switch in the ‘use explicit subject at all times’ position. The Spanish baby would put the switch in the other position. With me so far? Good.
Like all theories, it’s got its supporters and critics. Whatever your views on this, you’ve got to agree that kids may run around with their boundless energy, scribble with crayons on your walls, bellow like baby bulls if they don’t get their own way, and look sweet in school Nativity plays….and they’re also very good at learning languages. So why not start them off earlier?
As linguist Stephen Pinker said in his 1994 book, The Language Instinct (very good book btw), that: “acquisition of a normal language is guaranteed for children up to the age of six, is steadily compromised from then until shortly after puberty, and is rare thereafter” (Pinker 1994, p. 293).
The kids are wired to absorb languages like a sponge, so forget starting them at 7, and do it at nursery school. It will make it SO much easier for them in the long run.
Further reading
BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6435885.stm
National Centre for Languages: http://www.cilt.org.uk
NACELL: http://www.nacell.org.uk/index.htm