Second language: Early beginning

One of the most common myths about the assimilation of the second language is the idea that the sooner the child begins to learn a foreign language, the faster and better he will learn this language. It is this myth that underlies the popularity of language schools and courses for preschoolers or even completely babies. Let's try to understand, confirm or refute this myth modern scientific data.

The process of mastering the first, native language is studied in sufficient detail. It is known, for example, that newborns are able to distinguish between the sounds of any languages ​​of the world, but in the period between six and nine months, the kids “set up” the rumor in the language that parents speak with him: for example, children of Russian -speaking parents will continue to unmistakably distinguish between consonants in the syllables of “ra” and “la”, and little Japanese will lose the ability to distinguish these sounds - as unnecessary. There is no restrictions on the number of sounds that the nine-month-old child continues to distinguish between the nine-month-old child: children who grow in two- or multilingual families are equally well oriented in the sound systems of these languages.

Such children are called simultaneous bilinguals. Their linguistic development occurs almost in the same way as the development of their single -language peers, they pass the same stages of pre -reward development (screaming, humming, babble) and demonstrate a large scatter of the time of achievement of different stages of the actual speech development (first words, combinations of words/simple sentences), but by the age of four, most children learn the basic grammatical structures of their native language or languages ​​and begins actively (at the speed of a few words per day) replenish the vocabulary. Most of the existing studies of early children's bilingualism did not reveal any serious cognitive or other disorders that could be caused by them. As a rule, each of the vocabulary reserves of early bilinguals, even in adulthood, is slightly less than the vocabulary of monolingians of the same age, but bilingualism also has advantages: so, Ellen Babyste revealed a connection between early bilingualism and further academic successes of children due to the habit of switching attention or, for example, metallinguistic knowledge, that is, knowledge of the language.

The myth of the undoubted benefit of early learning of languages ​​arose precisely on the basis of what we know about the early simultaneous bilinguals, that is, children whose parents or educators constantly speak with the child in different languages ​​from the moment of birth, or at least from a very young age. But these data are not applicable to the situation of early consistent bilingualism (for example, children who were brought up in a Russian or franco-speaking family up to three or four years old, and then went to kindergarten in Israel, where educators and other children speak Hebrew) and even more so to the situation, say, English or German courses in Russia. Not a single child or an adult who studies the second language after he mastered the first one receives so many hours of continuous Invuting (sounding speech in the language being studied) that any baby receives in the family at the initial stage of learning the language. In addition, no one expects that the baby will speak earlier than about nine months, while from the studying second language it is customary to expect the ability to understand and reproduce at least a few words or simple phrases after the first classes.

The results of numerous studies indicate that the context plays the most important role, that is, the environment in which the language is studying. For example, children adopted from China during the age of two to five years during the observation (18 months) passed the same stages of speech development as single-language babies, but with the speed of replenishment of vocabulary, four times higher ( Snedecker , Geren , & Shafto , 2007). Most adult English -language missionaries over two years of stay and active work in the country of the language being studied (Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese) reached at least an advanced level of language proficiency. Of course, the achievements of those who studied different languages ​​differed (Japanese turned out to be the most difficult), but in general, these data indicate that in adults the process of studying the second language by natural immersion is no slower than in children. It should be noted that in most cases, children adopted in the foreign country are “surrounded” by the language in 24/7 mode, since adoptive parents, as a rule, do not speak their native language of these children, and some children did not even begin to speak the language among which they were born. In a situation where parents can communicate with the child in the language that understands him, the process takes a longer time. For example, Jennifer Larson-Hall, describing the assimilation of the English language by her seven-year-old Japanese daughter, writes that the girl took a year to start pronouncing coherent, albeit grammatically imperfect, verbose sentences in English, although the whole family (parents and three more children) spoke at home only in this language, although all family members also owned Japanese.

The advantage of the younger age of the start of language learning in the environment is not in the speed with which the process of achieving the basic level occurs, which allows you to communicate in this language (in this, adults do not lag behind children, and in some cases even overtake them), but in the fact that children are more likely to master the language at a level at which there will be no external (phonetic, grammatical, lexical) differences from native speakers. Thus, the well -known study of Robert Deayzer ( Dekeyser , 2000), which was attended by 57 Hungarian immigrants in the United States, showed that if almost all those who arrived under the age of 16 demonstrate almost one hundred percent tests on a grammatical test, only a few of those who came later show the same result (and this is, as a rule, people with high indicators of general cognitive and these intellectual abilities).

In a situation of studying foreign languages ​​in countries where these languages ​​do not speak, no advantages of the early beginning were revealed. The preliminary results of a long -term study of Swiss schoolchildren indicate that children who begin to study a language at the age of 12 are more motivated and successful than those who start in 8. According to the results of a recently published meta -analysis ( Qureshi , 2016), which compared the results of more than thirty empirical studies, the advantages of the early beginning (up to 11 years) were not detected for studying the language of the language of the language As a foreign, outside of Wednesday. The fact that in this case children over 11-12 are more successful than babies are explained by the fact that in the absence of a large amount of Invut (that is, in a situation of lessons one to two times a week), sufficiently developed abilities for abstract thinking and concentration of attention are required, which are formed to the full degree of transition from elementary school to secondary.

Bibliography

Brown, S., & Larson-Hall, J. (2012). Second Language Acquisition Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching. University of Michigan Press.

Dekeyser, RM (2000). The Robustness of Critical Period Effects in Second Language Acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition , 22 (4), 499-533.

Dewey, D., & Clifford, RT (2012). The Development of Speaking Proficiency of LDS Missionaries. In L. Hansen, & K. D. BOT (EDS.), Second Language Acquisition Abroad: The LDS Missionary Experience (PP. 29-49). Benjamins.

Lightbown, P., & Spada, NM (2013). How Languages ​​are Learned (4th Ed.). Oxford University Press.

Qureshi, Ma (2016). A meta-ANALYSIS: Age and Second Language Grammar Acquisition. System , 60, 147-160.

Snedeker, J., Geren, J., & Shafto, C. (2007). International Adoption As a Natural Experiment in Language Development. PSYCHOLOGICAL Science, 18 (1), 79-87.