Daniel's Blog

If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Spanish

CONVENTIONAL wisdom says it is never too early for children to learn a foreign language. But conventional wisdom predates the days of paying someone to teach your child another tongue.

“The marketplace has parents totally bamboozled,� said Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, co-author of “Einstein Never Used Flashcards: How Our Children Really Learn — and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less� (Rodale Books, 2003) and “How Babies Talk: The Magic and Mystery of Language in the First Three Years of Life� (Dutton, 1999). “Being immersed in the language and living within it are what lead to language learning, not 20 minutes of exposure to a limited set of vocabulary and sentence structures or attendance at a weekly one-hour Spanish class.�

An increasing number of American parents fluent in a foreign language, as well as their English-only counterparts, want their children to be bilingual if not multilingual. While no one knows how much is spent in total on games, books, DVDs, online tools and foreign-language baby sitters, the amount can easily reach thousands of dollars a year per toddler. That counts tutors who charge $70 an hour, classes for $50 a week, foreign au pairs who can cost $16,000 a year and annual tuition at private immersion schools that charge $20,000 for nine months of study.

The most effective way for children to learn another language is through a parent or caregiver, in an immersion school or even living abroad, say linguists, language teachers and bilingual parents.

To really learn a foreign language, children must spend 30 percent of their waking time exposed to it, said Christina Bosemark, founder of the Multilingual Children’s Association in San Francisco, which guides parents rearing multilingual children. She said children with less contact might understand a language, but their ability to speak it correctly would be hindered. Nonetheless, limited exposure as babies or toddlers could help if children study the language later, she said.

Language teachers, linguists and scientists refer to the so-called critical period, the tender years when children most easily pick up languages. Opinions vary, with some experts saying the cutoff ends at 2, 3, 5, 7 or 13.

Strict classroom training is wasted on the pre-5-year-old set, according to educators who say that toddlers are more inclined to chew on a doll’s head than point to “la tête.� Still, T. Berry Brazelton, the child development guru and author, said children as young as 3 might be well suited to language class — but only if they want to be there. Parents, he said, often steer their offspring into what they themselves find interesting rather than what the child enjoys.

[Excerpts from New York Times]

Comments

Who is Daniel

Soy un desarrollador de informatica que vino a Irlanda hace 5 años y me estableci aqui. De jugar al rugby me pase a jugar al futbol y mas tarde me inscribi en una escuela de Karate. Me gusta degustar la comida y reunirme con los amigos en una cafeteria.

Previous Entries

• test
• test
• test
• test
• Volatilidad en los mercados financieros
• Comida latina en Dublin
• Aprende viendo videos
• Living in a Spanish house
• Revista de audio española para niveles Intermedio y Avanzado
• Navega que FireFox te lo traduce