Some time ago, I had an opportunity to visit an American family who was living and working in a remote area of Ecuador. I was very impressed with their five-year-old daughter who spoke three languages fluently: English, Spanish, and Quechua. No one had made an effort to teach her these languages, but because she was exposed to each on a daily basis, she picked them up on her own. She moved with ease between the languages, quickly ascertaining who would understand which. She was more fluent than her parents in Quechua, the indigenous language of the Andean region.

 

When Janis Jensen, world languages coordinator for the New Jersey Department of Education, visited several foreign language classrooms, she found that students began studying languages in elementary school and were proficient in at least two, if not three, languages by the time they reached secondary school. But Jensen wasn't surprised—she was touring schools in Germany, where early learning and high expectations of proficiency in foreign languages have a long history.

 

Much research is available which demonstrates the advantages of young people learning foreign languages. When children are very young, they often learn languages more quickly. Some schools create very successful immersion programs. The five-year-old I knew in Ecuador was in a naturally occurring foreign language immersion program.

 

In Foreign Languages No Longer Just for Big Kids, Susan Curtiss, a UCLA professor of linguistics, states, "There's something very special about the brain and mind during early life that makes it exactly ripe for developing language." Studies have shown that children who begin learning a second language early in life gain a more native-sounding pronunciation, better overall grammar skills, and other benefits.

 

Spanish remains the dominant foreign language in schools, reflecting in part a trend in U.S. demographics. Hispanics are now the country's largest minority, and the number of children who speak a language other than English at home has more than doubled since 2003.

 

In Foreign Language Learning: An Early Start, Curtain Helena summarizes some of the important reasons for beginning foreign language at an early age.

If education is a means by which to prepare children for the complicated world that they inhabit, to give them tools with which to understand new challenges, then the educational system should offer an expansive foreign language curriculum as early as possible.

 

If parents and teachers wish to start a foreign language program in their school, they will benefit from consulting Guidelines for Starting an Elementary School Foreign Language Program, by Marcia Rosenbusch, National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center. In this article, the author lists reasons why some foreign language programs failed in the 1950s and 1960s and what should be done to assure that a newly started school program will succeed.