Writing Feedback / ielts: learn a language in primary school or secondary school? [6]

Some people think that it is better for children to begin to learn a foreign language at primary school than at secondary school. What is your opinion?

Acquiring a second language becomes a useful skill to most people today due to the increasing globalization. Thus it raises a question to the public that when should children start to learn another language. I suggest the children who learn a foreign language at elementary school will have more benefits than the ones at secondary school.

Firstly, young kids have more time to focus on the study of a new language, compared with the older students. Students normally have more subjects to study when they finish primary school and enter into secondary. Take China as an example, pupils only have three main subjects, whilst high school students have six. Hence, children need to allocate their time to more tasks after they go to high school, leading to less time spent on studying a new language, which, by contrast, needs a lot of time to learn well.

Apart from that, it is easier for children to learn a foreign language when they are young because of their good memory. Research shows that the best period of people's memory is between 10 to 15 years old. Generally speaking, learning language need recite a lot of materials including words, grammar and phrases. Thus, on this stage, primary school students have more advantages than their older competitors.

Admittedly, learning language is more than recitation, instead, it's also about studying the culture behind that language. High school students usually have higher abilities on understanding, which is an important capability for culture studying. However, even students begin to learn a foreign language at their elementary school, they also could learn the culture when they start high school.

In conclusion, though it will never be too late to start to learn a second language, students start to learn it in elementary school will have more advantages than who start in secondary school.

Plz fell free to give any comments. I've tried ielts for several times, but always get 6 on writting. I know there should me many problems in my essay, but I couldn't figure them out.

Thanks!