Trilingual toddlers, once a species round nearly exclusively around - mbassy dining rooms and naval base playgrounds, have seen a jump in population numbers recently. Today, New York abounds with 2-year-olds enrolled in French and Mandarin classes, and more than a few 6-month-old ! children are whisked off to Italian and Spanish instruction several times a week.
Francois Thibaut, the founder and director of the Language Workshop for Children, says he has been teaching foreign languages to children as young as 6 months old for more than three decades and has seen the number of parents seeking the instruction grow quite a bit over this time. "When I started 35 years ago, people thought it was a crazy idea to teach children that young," he said. Now, many of his classes have a waiting list. He noted that laneuaee instruction preferences also have evolved over time - from French 30 years ago to Spanish 10 years ago to Chinese today.
Recent research has shown that the brain may be best equipped to learn a foreign language fluently before the age of 5 or 6 years, and some psychologists say that foreign language instruction for young children has a positive impact on various areas of child development. Bruce Homer, a research associate professor in applied psychology at New York University, stated that there is some evidence that foreign language instruction is beneficial to a child's general cognitive development, adding that bilingual children generally appear to have a higher degree of cognitive flexibility.
Regarding when parents should begin such education, he stated that the language, the better. "It's somewhat controversial, but our brains are programmed at an early age to acquire languages," says Homer. "Young children absorb the language around them." He explained that everyone is born with the ability to distinguish a wide range of phonetic sounds in every language, but that we gradually lose this ability as we grow up, instead honing in on our native language or languages.
Chris Lucas, an associate professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at New York University's Child Study Center, agrees that early can be better than later when it comes to instruction, but that parents need to proceed with a bit of caution. Unless a child is raised in a bilingual household, says Lucas, parents should wait to see whether their child develops normally in a primary language before enrolling them in foreign language classes to ensure he or she doesn't have a developmental language learning disorder.
Both Homer and Lucas agree, however, that more important than the number of languages taught or whether a child starts classes at 6 or 16 months is the richness of their language exposure. A single class once a week will not a bilingual child make. In fact, a low level of foreign language exposure can even be slightly detrimental, because there can be come confusion between languages as the child trues to comprehend both. "A little bit of knowledge can sometimes not be beneficial," says Homer. In other words, signing your 2-year-old up for three language classes may not be harmful, but providing one scant instruction in each might be.
So how best to provide an immersive education for young children? Most instructors agree that the key is to incorporate elements of play, listening, and interaction in the classroom and at home. Most institutions provide materials such as books or DVDs for parents to take home so children can have more exposure to the language, and many instructors urge parents to seek out extracurricular activities that incorporate language learning, such as a trip to Chinatown for a toddler enrolled in Mandarin class, or a visit to a bistro for a child a child taking French. Not only will this reinforce language education but it will help develop a child's lasting interest.
Still, parents should do some legwork to find a program that is more than just fun and games. There must be an effective method behind the instruction, says Thibaut of Language Workshop for Children, adding for example that his classes take into account different styles of learning, such as movement and listening.
Parents also need to be flexible when it comes to their expectations. "Parents shouldn't judge their child's progress by adult standards' says Rachel Myer, co-founder of ABC Language Exchange. Like so many other things learning a new language takes time.
Zhaodan Huang, manager of the Children's Program at the China Institute, urges parents to be patient with their kids. In other words, a father shouldn't expect his three-year-old to strike up a conversation in Mandarin with the neighbors. Yet, noting that enrollment tends to drop off for the higher level classes, Huang also says that it's equally important to encourage your kids to stick with it. Especially because learning a foreign language is about more than just speaking Spanish or Chinese. It's about becoming a more global-minded thinker.
"It gets kids to become open-minded and to learn about other cultures and different traditions," says Patrizia Saglio, co-director of the Italian language center, Lo Spazio in Collina. And what's not to like about that?
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