Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

The optimum starting age
As millions of children have witnessed in the bi-lingual areas
of the world, a second and even a third language can be
acquired from the very earliest ages, without any seeming
effort or retardation of the mother tongue. What is more,
this is shown to occur to all normal children, irrespective of
levels of intelligence. In a situation, therefore, when two or
more languages are in natural use, they are best acquired
together from the cradle. Children of mixed parentage often
grow up happily using one language with the mother and
another with the father and perhaps friends. A somewhat
similar, ‘natural’ situation occurs where very young children

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Young Children Learning English
168
are placed in a new language setting in which they, seemingly
unconsciously, pick up a foreign language. Punjabi
immigrant children who attend English nursery and primary
schools, Spanish-speaking infants in English-speaking
convent classes in Argentina and French 4-year-olds in
Parisian écoles maternelles with native English teachers all
show—after an initial period of settling down—how the very
young child can learn totally fluent and natural English,
without strain, embarrassment or even effort.
Teachers of English in the foreign primary school have
argued that their children are uninhibited, positively enjoy
most of the repetitive kinds of language activities and are
ready for situational (as opposed to intellectual) learning.
Interference from the mother tongue has been shown to be less
before the age of 10 and neuro-physical clinical investigations
suggest that the speech learning centre of the brain is at its
maximum capacity between the first and ninth year of life.
Socio-cultural arguments for an early start emphasise the
breaking of the traditionally parochial character of the
primary school, with the introduction of an international
element that today is more essential than it has ever been.
Against all the evidence of ready foreign language learning
in the young, must be set the balanced demands of the
curriculum. Most school experiments have determined that
starting a foreign language at the age 8–9 on the one hand
does not fail to catch ‘the teachable moment’, and on the
other gives time for the basic mother tongue skills to have
been firmly established. Ideally a child should not be taught
to read and write English before he is literate in his mother
tongue, and the basic concepts of his first language are
normally useful stepping stones to those of another.