Importance of teaching kids a foreign language outside of the home
Given all the events happening around the BLM movement, I couldn’t help myself but think that it’s equally important to teach our children foreign languages since it will give them a bigger picture of other cultures.
Growing up in a second world country in the late ’90s and early 2000s there weren’t any worldwide popular cartoons in my mother tongue. As the rest of the kids, I was watching a lot of cartoons in English. People that surrounded me at the time were concerned that it was a bad thing and that I wouldn’t be able to speak my language of origin very well. Fast forward to today, everyone wants their kid to learn as many languages as possible and they see it as an opportunity. So what changed?
20 years later, I’m now fluent in French, English and of course my language of origin. I lived in France, studied in French, I taught English and French to kids and adults, and I speak all of the 3 languages daily. So was my childhood the thing that gave me a thirst for multilingualism?
I can’t say that it was genetic since none of my family members are even bilingual let alone multilingual. So there must be something in listening to foreign languages as a child, that can give you a predisposition for learning languages later.
Exposure to a foreign language ignites infants learning
If you want your child to learn foreign languages but you don’t speak any yourself, there still is a way you can do it.
Exposing your child to the sounds of a foreign language will ignite his imagination and will make it easier for him to learn the language even if he doesn’t understand it at the moment.
There was a study done by early language development researchers at the University of Washington Institute of Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS). They wanted to study if a child that is exposed to a foreign language outside of the home, can effectively learn it.
They taught kids from 7 months to 33 months a foreign language, only 1 hour per day for 18 weeks. The children showed rapid interest and comprehension of the foreign language they were learning and that they retained what they learned even after the period of the study.
Travel
If you have a chance, the best way you can teach your child not just a foreign language but also foreign cultures is through travel. Seeing other people’s lives and hearing other languages on the street will make your child more interested in foreign languages than ever. Even eating foods specific to culture will ignite your child’s imagination and help them develop the thirst for foreign languages and cultures. And we all learned how important it is to teach our children’s other cultures, therefore this would be the best way to do it if you have the means.
Conclusion
One important thing to retain is that kids up until the age of 3 have amazing abilities to learn anything since their brains are like sponges that will soak up everything around them.
Another important thing to remember is that they learn through play. Learning needs to be integrated into children’s play, which is exactly what the researchers did. They played with them for an hour each day and gave them new words and phrases.
Finally, I would never recommend forcing your child to learn a new language if you can see they’re not at all interested since that can give the opposite effect and they could get an aversion to any foreign language.
