Weighing Cons of Kids Learning a New Language

Your choice to expose your child to second-language education is a choice with lasting effects. Because learning a second language in childhood puts extra cognitive strain on the language centres of the brain, a child learning two languages at once will face different intellectual problems than monolingual children. Parents should learn about the possible negatives before they make an informed choice about whether send their children to foreign language studies. Agreement within the family is perhaps the most essential ingredient.  An insecure spouse may fear being excluded from “the secret language” between the other parent and the child. Discuss and compromise. It is very important that couples find some solution that is acceptable to both parents as well as beneficial to the child. Children are sponges for learning when they’re young, and some believe that children have the ability to easily pick up new languages. However, studying a new language as early as in kindergarten may come with unfortunate disadvantages, such as a lack of proper teaching resources or time to achieve measurable results. The academic requirements of a kindergarten classroom may make it difficult to include additional instruction in a foreign language. Native language speakers are the most effective teachers to help kindergarten students learn a new language, and many kindergarten teachers are not native in the foreign language being taught at a particular school. Thus, they may struggle with helping children learn to speak the language comfortably.

After the initial novelty of learning sessions, some young children become frustrated by their inability to express their thoughts in the new language. Others want to speak quickly in that language as they can in their home language. Children should not be told they have made a mistake because any correction will immediately demotivate them. Mistakes may be part of the process of working out grammar rules or they may be a fault in pronunciation. Learning a new language puts extra cognitive strain on children. This strain affects children differently. For example, toddlers have the cognitive capacity to learn approximately 20 new words a month, but this number is for total words. When a toddler’s language input comes in the form of two languages, she might only learn 10 words in her native language a month, learning the other 10 words in her foreign language, which puts her behind in her native language. Millions of students also take classes online. Still, while many successfully use software and online resources to become bilingual, disadvantages remain when learning a second language from your computer. Because you don’t spend money on commuting or paying campus housing fees, online learning is cheaper, which is a major plus. Students who log in to computers to learn, however, lose interest in the subject they’re studying early on in the process. Learning from the convenience of home, as opposed to a classroom, is not always ideal.

Budget-savvy parents spend big bucks on language lessons because they’re investing in bigger pay checks for their kids down the road—but the return on your investment may be smaller than you think. If you’re looking for a way to make sure your kid rakes in the big bucks, skip the language lessons and invest that money in graduate school. The closer your child gets to college, the busier his schedule gets. Adding language tutoring a few times a week can swamp your child and bring his overall performance down. Learning a second language can give your kid a boost at school and in his social life, but when it comes to college applications and future earnings, he can be just as successful with one language as with two. Weighing the costs and benefits can help you decide if your child will reap the rewards of learning a second language.

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