Language Learning for Children

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. If you want to learn a language or you teach a language, you’ve come to the right place. Join Janina each week for tips, resources, and advice for making engaging language learning happen anytime, anywhere.

How can my child learn to speak another language, especially if I don’t. It’s a question I get a lot, and I want to talk about the research, the benefits, as well as some actionable things that you could do as a parent to get your children the opportunity to be proficient in more than one language. Throughout my career, I’ve taught languages to a lot of children. I’ve taught private classes to youngsters and groups of youngsters. I’ve also been a language immersion teacher in Seoul, Korea. I was Director of the English Language Immersion School at Sejong University. I’m a certified kindergarten teacher, which I taught earlier in my career. I also have a Spanish language immersion teaching credential from grades K through eight, where you teach regular content areas with part of the day in Spanish. I’ve also taught Spanish to elementary school students.

I don’t think there’s any better gift than you can give a child than language, be that learning how to read, because when you can read, you can learn anything, or being able to communicate with more and more people. There are so many benefits to being able to speak another language. The general cognitive benefits are outstanding. There are many studies that have been done that talk about children’s executive functions and in cognitive neuroscience, essentially what that means, is being able to switch tasks. So being able to pay attention to different things, one thing, and then easily get into another thing, so it’s very good.

Critical thinking. Learning another language just helps you problem solve because you learn so much through negotiating meaning. And problem solving. I truly believe that people who speak more than one language are very flexible because when we learn languages, we learn not just the words and the systems, we also learned the way of looking at things. We learn about the culture, which is the products, the practices, and the perspectives. So we learned different ways of looking at things and it gives you more possibilities. There’s not just one way to do things, there’s many ways to do things. It helps in reading, reading scores are very, very much improved in students who speak more than one language. And we’ll talk about a students who do this as a second language, a little bit later.

SAT scores. Just overall improved academic performance, so there are many ways or many contexts rather, where students learn languages or kids, children learn to speak more than one language. And I just want to go over a few really common ones. You might have a situation where, as I was just talking about, a child immigrates with their family from one country to another. For example, you are a Portuguese speaker and you find yourself living in the United States and you need to learn English. That’s one example, but of course there are infinite possibilities there.

And in those cases, the child tends to learn their native language at home, that’s the language of communication in their home. And when they go to school is when they learn the other language. And people used to really worry about this model, where you’ve got a native language at home and another language at school, they would be afraid that their children would fall behind in school and maybe they would speak to them in their native language, which they weren’t necessarily academically proficient in.