Is it necessary to teach our children English at an early age?

By Lie Hua

JAKARTA (JP): An article in Kompas recently took many by surprise when it said that according to a research study, junior high school students who began studying English after elementary school scored better than those who learned it much earlier.

What is interesting to note here is that the finding contradicts the widely held belief that English should be introduced to someone very early in their life if they hope to master it. This popular belief explains why children in many elementary schools and even kindergartens, particularly in large cities, struggle to commit foreign words to memory.

What is at work here is ignorance on the part of school organizers and parents. They seem to have little knowledge of how a language works and how it is to be successfully acquired.

It is sad to say this ignorance has fattened the wallets of some people who, knowing parents' eagerness to see their little darlings utter the language, have set up English courses which they claim are designed to suit children's needs. It is also sad to see that some schools, some even well-reputed, include English in their curricula just to lure parents to send their children to these schools.

The result of this English for children craze is, unfortunately, a fiasco. How many of these children, who have been exposed to English for quite a number of years, will really master the language later? The odds are big that not many will.

In the hullabaloo over teaching English to children here, one important thing seems to have been missed. It seems that acquainting children with the language is a sure way toward ensuring that they have a good mastery of the language later in life.

In fact, language has its own patterns. While it is behavioral, a language is not simply rote repetition. A child will have a good grasp of his or her mother tongue only gradually, through a trial-and-error process.

How does this happen? Now, think of this situation: The child learns to produce meaningless sounds. At the same time, he learns meaningful sounds (words) from his surroundings. He imitates the sounds when he communicates with his surroundings. At first, he may fail to make himself understood, because what he utters has little resemblance to words the sound of which people around him are familiar with. However, the child perseveres and as he grows older, his ability to imitate meaningful sounds improves. The process will go on, naturally of course, until he can fully and properly produce meaningful sounds.

At the same time, the child is also learning to get a good grasp of his mother tongue's sentence patterns. In short, the child has to go through a process of learning by doing before he can finally use his mother tongue properly. The most important thing to take note of is that in this process, everything is learned naturally. When a mistake is made, it will be corrected, just in order not to create misunderstanding.

Another important thing to notice is that children hear meaningful sounds and sentence patterns in their mother tongue all their waking hours. They will, whether or not they are aware of it, adjust their pronunciation and their sentence patterns to the sounds and patterns they hear around them. These are their best models.

What about learning a foreign language? This is a different process in that one's effort to master a foreign language is made with full consciousness. We have models -- sounds and sentence patterns -- before us, and must consciously commit them to memory in order to be able to reproduce them when needed.

Of course, if one lives in a place where the language is spoken, the benefit is that one will come into contact with the language's sounds and patterns almost at any time. However, what if one does not live in a place where the language is spoken? Of course, one must make efforts to be in contact with the language as frequently as possible, for example, by reading newspapers and magazines and listening to cassettes and radio broadcasts in that language. All these extra efforts will, hopefully, make the sounds and patterns of the foreign language stay in one's memory, ready for retrieval at any moment they are needed.

It is clear, then, that in learning a foreign language, our consciousness plays a vital role. In this case, knowledge of the sounds and patterns of one's mother tongue contributes much to one's effort to learn a foreign language. One can easily remember how a particular sound differs from that of one's mother tongue. One can also easily compare sentence patterns in the new language with those of his mother tongue. So, while one makes a conscious effort to reproduce the sounds and patterns of the new language, he is aware of the above-mentioned differences. (Hence, learning a foreign language correctly is as easy as learning it wrongly. If you start correctly, then you will be able to use the language correctly as well, and vice versa. )

Now, to get back to our question: Is it necessary to teach our children English? In this case, I'm afraid the answer is in the negative. Teaching English to children who barely have a good command of their mother tongue will only be a waste of time because the children, most of whom will not be intensively in contact with the sounds and patterns of English will, in the end, only have some hazy familiarity with the language, which can easily slip into an incorrect knowledge of the language, a factor very difficult to put right later when the child wishes to learn the language more seriously.

On the other hand, when a child has already completed his elementary schooling, he will have sufficient knowledge of his mother tongue. Besides having a natural mastery of his mother tongue, he will, by then, have quite a good grasp of its formal aspects. He will then be ready to go through the process of learning a foreign language, as described above.

So, isn't it much better to make sure that our children have a good command of their mother tongue first before learning English, rather than introducing English to them very early when the result is that, in the case of the latter, the children will have mastery of neither?

The writer is a lecturer at the Faculty of Letters at the Nasional University, Jakarta.