Teaching foreign languages at primary school should be optional rather than compulsory. Ielts task 2

Some people believe that it is better for children to begin learning a foreign language at primary school rather than secondary school. Discuss both views and give your opinion.

children's burden

The virtues of learning foreign languages are too visible to be neglected. But is it wise to burden children with foreign language lessons from their primary school? I rather doubt it. From my perspective, it should be optional rather than compulsory.

On the one hand, it is an undeniable fact that learning foreign languages can develop the cognitive skills of children. It has been proved that bilingual people are more prone to see issues from different angles and their decision process is faster than their monolingual peers. Apart from that, this can also fuel their communication skills, so making friends would not be challenging for them. Moreover, knowing additional languages improves their career prospects, thereby their employability will be enhanced in their later life.

Even if having considered all these facts, would they enough to making language classes mandatory before secondary school? By no means, our future dreams should not be at the cost of children's spare time. At their earlier ages, their freedom, desires, should be our first priority instead of imposing our preferences. We cannot want from them to sacrifice their childhood, all we can do is just to drum up more interest in such things which in turn will be very useful as time goes by. Taking into consideration that they have a long education life in times to come, it would be cruelty of us to demand more.

In conclusion, I reaffirm my position that we try to lighten children's burden at their earlier ages and spending extra time to learning a foreign language should depend on their choices.

According to me, a student must first be fully aware of his/her mother tongue before picking up a foreign language, which should be encourage at the secondary school. Anyways, very well written!

@Jnanam Shah
Thanks for your feedback :)

Adam, your essay is flawed in more ways than one. For starters, you are never to present a question in the essay. That is not an acceptable mode of discussion for an essay that is to be based on personal opinion and other facts. Then, there is the even bigger problem of you not presenting a validly developed personal opinion paragraph in the essay that could accurately present your thoughts on the matter. You cannot take the discussion of the two sides individually and pass that off as your own. You need to have a separate paragraph to represent your opinion. You can present that as the second to the last paragraph in your essay. At this moment I am not sure about whether or not I should give you a band score for this essay because of the problems in it that I am sure you can correct once it is pointed out to you.

@Holt
First, thanks. Your feedbacks are always very detailed and I learn many things from them. For introduction, I just wanted to write in different style. As I see it, it is not sufficient, so I will change it. But, I really confused with essay structure. Probably, I mixed discussion essays with opinion essays, because this structure is one of best for opinion essays. I just wonder that will it be wrong if I discuss opposed views on the main bodies and give my opinion in the conclusion, rather than add new paragraph for my opinion?

Adam, I am not sure where you got the idea that you can present your opinion in the concluding statement. That is the wrong approach. The personal opinion is always presented in a separate paragraph because the rules of academic writing state that no additional or new information can be presented in the concluding statement. To be precise, the concluding statement should be comprised of 3-5 sentences that do the following:

1. Present the restated prompt discussion.
2. Offer the two opposing points of view.
3. Reiterate your opinion.
4. Offer a closing sentence to conclude the essay.

Also, the proper format for discussing this type of essay, in my opinion is as follows:

1. Paraphrased prompt, two opinions, your personal opinion.
2. Opposing point of view discussion
3. Supporting point of view presentation
4. Your personal opinion in support of the third statement
5. Concluding statement

I find that the aforementioned format for a discussion or compare and contrast essay works best for most essay presentations.