Fouth version of my PWP Essay

Universidad del Valle

Licenciatura en Lenguas Extranjeras

Composición escrita en Inglés VII

Profesora: Sol colmenares

Estudiante: Leidy Yareth Martínez López

Learning a Foreign or second language in childhood

(Essay)

   This essay is addressed basically to people who are interested on knowing more about learning processes or learning styles. However, the topic could be interesting for the whole educative community of Second Language Learning and Teaching.

In this paper, I seek to highlight the arguments that have been established by scholars in the field of linguistics in favor of and against second language acquisition in early childhood. In particular, I will develop further the following three main points of discourse: first, some perspectives from experts that argue since there is a biological change in human’s brain and for old people is difficult to achieve a second or foreign language, so learn it from children would be better in order to get it easily, second, some ideas about learning a new language is easier for adults than it is for children; third, it is important for children to know very well their mother tongue in order to encourage the construction of an identity. Lastly, I will conclude that is better not to make children learn a new language since early childhood.

   I chose this topic because nowadays Colombia has been involved in a National Program of Bilingualism and one of its main objectives is to spread English as a second language all around the country. Since that project is already running, in the educative context English classes have become more common since primary and in high school most of the students receive those classes more regularly. Thus, this is a topic that involves our Colombian educative and also social environment.

    First, in my text I have selected a study made in the United States called New Approaches to Using Census Data to Test the Critical-Period Hypothesis for Second-Language Acquisition by Kenji Hakuta, a Professor of Education at Stanford University; Ellen Bialystok, a Research Professor of Psychology at York University and Edward Wiley, an assistant professor of quantitative methods in educational policy at the University of Colorado-Boulder. These researchers made a test to analyze the critical Period Hypothesis with people from several ages. At the end of the study, they expressed that the results of the test it was demonstrated that proficiency scores declined with increases in age of initial exposure to the second language.

Although they did not say it, there is an implicit idea that encourage people to learn a new language from childhood since later it would be more difficult.

   In Cali, for example, there are some schools in which the bilingualism is the base of their educative proposal. Some of them offer to teach the children the foreign language by using it the whole time. They have several American teachers in order to make children being in contact with the foreign language context and their courses of the new language began from preschool. Other institutions offer a strong base of English although they are not bilingual and their English component is often taught with interference of the mother tongue. Nevertheless, these latest present a good level not only of the foreign language but also of the first one.

   Second, another point of view is the one from David Ausubel in his text Adults Versus Children in Second-Language Learning: Psychological Considerations, in this work he establishes some differences between adults and children that help the latest to reach the new language, nevertheless, he also mentions some ways in which adults are better than children in that process. In fact, one of the two main aspects he demonstrates in his text is that adults can acquire new languages more readily than children.

We must appreciate the fact that the child does not learn his native language with phenomenal ease and rapidity Quite the contrary, his acquisition of the mother tongue is a long, slow and arduous process despite prolonged and continuous exposure, and despite exceedingly strong motivation to learn so that he can communicate with adults and peers. Typically he is four years old before his use of syntax even begins to approximate the conventional standards of his language.

Ausubel, D. (1964)

    Ausubel (1964) not only argues that adults have advantages over children in achieving a new language but he let people to know that an aspect that is important to define if learning a foreign or second language from early ages is appropriate or not, because he says that children are four years old before his use of syntax, so since children need four years to develop the process of acquiring the syntax of their mother tongue it would be better to let this process to go beyond before making them get another language, in that way it would be possible that they learn the second language by having a solid base of the first one.

Third, acquire a mother tongue can lead children to know their own culture and to construct their identity. That is a point that the National Bilingualism Program has not taken in account, to enhance the knowledge about the own culture and respect for the characteristics that are involved in that word.

Developing identity through mother tongue is not always well developed in the case of the bilingual institutions before mentioned, in fact they tend to accept traditional aspects from the North American culture and they do not even care about some Colombian traditions or believes.

    Lastly, I conclude that although they exist some advantages in terms of biological brain’s development for children, they also have some disadvantages when achieving a new language in front of adults and the environments where they are learning the foreign language frequently pass over the use of the mother tongue to enhance the construction of identity in students. Saying so, learning a new language since early childhood would not be appropriate, at least they should have learned their mother tongue and manage it before learning a new one.

REFERENCES

Hakuta, k.; Bialystok, E and Wiley, E. (2005) New Approaches to Using Census Data to Test the Critical-Period Hypothesis for Second-Language Acquisition

Ausubel, D. (1964) Adults versus Children in Second-Language Learning: Psychological Considerations.