Benefits of an early start in learning foreign languages

In the European Union, 50 percent of the population is fluent in more than one language, compared to a mere 25 percent in the United States.

All nations in the European Union, in fact, aside from Ireland and Scotland, require students to take foreign language classes.

Instead of categorizing language classes as electives, Europeans consider these classes part of a student’s core and place special emphasis on language in the lower grade levels.

In around 80 percent of these nations, taking classes in not one, but two, foreign languages is mandatory during the elementary school years.

Despite the obvious benefits of knowing a foreign language, it’s possible to graduate from Granite Bay High School and never have to set foot in a foreign language class throughout a student’s entire educational career.

The Eureka Union School District may be doing its students a disservice by not offering opportunities for foreign language learning in the kindergarten and elementary grades.

This poses the question whether schools are making foreign language learning more difficult than it needs to be, by teaching students after the closure of this critical period.

Most GBHS students’ experiences with foreign languages begin as freshmen, which many language educators, such as French teacher Lynne Guerne, say is much too late. Guerne has instructed both high school and elementary level language classes in the United States as well as in France.

“You’re curious at (a young) age and it is interesting and fun, but also physiologically you are more capable of making the sounds,” Guerne said. “You just soak it all in.”

Ruth Finsthwait, the owner of local Spanish education program Sombrero Time, like Guerne, is an advocate for beginning language learning at an early age.

Finsthwait uses immersion techniques to place her pupils on track to become bilingual in the future and will often hold events at which students can exercise their Spanish outside of the confines of the classroom.

“The earlier you get to learn another language as a child the better,” said Jasmine Foddrill, a mother of two young children enrolled in the Sombrero Time program. “Not only do they pick it up faster, but their accent is better.”

Recently, Finsthwait invited her students and their families to local Mexican restaurant Más, where participants spoke nothing but Spanish to their waiters and friends and enjoyed a lesson on Spanish dancing from a Spanish dance troupe.

“We want to (reach) them young, as young as possible, because we know that the expansion of language is greatest for 7 and under, but we don’t start until 13 or 14,” Finsthwait said.

It is true that children are more equipped for gaining language skills than teens or adults, as their brains are still developing.

“It turns out there is a critical window for language development,” psychology teacher Natalie Elkin said. “And the onset of adolescence or the onset of puberty is the time in which that window closes.”

Initially proposed by psychologist Noam Chomsky, there is a structure in the brain called the language acquisition device, which scientists believe works from birth until puberty to allow babies to develop language skills both in their native language and in other languages to which the child is exposed.

According to Elkin, the door for all language learning does not shut forever after the end of the critical period has been reached, the brain simply stores novel language information in a manner that is less efficient.

“To attempt to learn a second language after (the critical period) is much more difficult because the language centers of our brain, which are stored in the left hemisphere, have stopped developing,” Elkin said. “The way our brains connect to (language) information is neurologically different than when we learn and are exposed to language before the development stops.”