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

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.