Continuing from last month’s article, understanding comes long before speaking. There have been several studies that have, in one way or another, found advantages in starting children off in a new language at a young age. Researchers don’t know whether it is biological or social, but most children who learn a language before puberty seem to develop the ability to speak it as a native would.
‘Understanding Comes Long Before Speaking’ – François Thibaut, who pioneered language learning for infants, founded The Thibaut Technique in 1973. He says the method works better when the babies are preverbal. “Understanding comes long before speaking, and speaking before reading and writing,” he says. “That’s the way you learn your own language.” There are no translators in any of Thibaut’s classes, because he says when we translate for children we actually add confusion; for clarity we should keep using the word we want them to learn.
Multilingual Myths – Some parents fear that with all these different words and languages, their children will have a harder time picking up English or will get confused. However, there are emerging theories that the brain is designed to pick up multiple languages early in life, and that our current monolingual focus is actually an evolutionary aberration.
Allesandra is a teenager who started studying languages at the Language Workshop for Children before she can remember. She speaks fluent French, Spanish, Italian and English, and is working on Chinese, Portuguese and Latin … and she hasn’t even set foot in a high school yet. A well-rounded and articulate young woman, Allesandra recognizes the advantages that multiple languages will afford her, and still wants to pick up Hindi (the national language of India) by the time she enters college. “When I am older, I want to have an international job in something that has to do with health care or medicine … because I really like science, too,” she says. “So, I think that by knowing Hindi and Chinese, I could work in parts of the world that need a lot of help.”
The ‘Apple’ Example – Allesandra’s interest and excellence in math and science is not an unusual byproduct for children who are fluent in multiple languages. Research has indicated that multilingual students do as well, if not better, on standardized tests in high school than their monolingual peers.
To understand why, think of an apple, and then think of the word “apple.” If you speak only one language, you associate the object (the apple) with that word, and only that word. But, for example, if you know three languages and three words for “apple,” the words become more like symbols to you, similar to the symbol “x” in an algebraic equation.
Perhaps so many engineers and computer scientists are involved in software breakthroughs because they’ve become fluent with symbols the way a poet has with words. And perhaps some future poets of symbols and words are getting a head start as bilingual babies.
For more information about foreign language classes for infants and children, please contact A Small World at 661-296-2226 or visit www.lwfc-asmallworld.com .