is it better for children to begin learning a foreign language at primary schools rather than secondary school?
It is irrefutable that foreign languages become more and more essential to get precious jobs. Therefore, children are facilitated to learn the second language at the early ages rather than secondary school. This prevailing trend obviously results in both strengths and shortcomings.
Learning new languages at primary school creates number of positive aspects. The main advantage is that children have ability to acquire knowledge more effortlessly than adolescents. Since they have not been self-conscious yet, children are more confident and courageous when representing their voices, opinions, and action. Result from that, education process takes place naturally instead of obtaining passively. Moreover, because of curiousness, studying fresh things make them more comfortable and fascinated in learning. Another point in its favor is the children' brains programmed to gain up to three languages. Additionally, the young age is the best period to absorb vocabularies as their brains allow them to memorize new things swiftly.
Despite these aforementioned attractions, some drawbacks do exist. Firstly, studying another language can lead to language disorder, which may have negative effects on the development of the linguistic. Children need to concentrate on both mother tongue and foreign languages, so sometimes they can encounter confusion to pick up a word. One additional bad side of early learning foreign language is that unbalanced language level will be occurred in secondary school if primary language education is not homogenized. It will cause the lack of students' enthusiasm when they feel inferior to their peers.
In conclusion, it is worth considering that there are both bright sides and dark sides of learning different language at primary school. The benefit consists of making study process easier and more comfortable while the obstacles are language confusion and different study level. However, from my point of view, the downsides of early learning language are overshadowed by the upsides.
