Wow. This article managed to surprise me. Not the fact that kids aren’t any better than adults at learning things deliberately, class-room style–I suppose I thought they would be worse at this, but better at unstructured learning-from-stuff-happening-around-them. (I suppose I thought this because the way that young children learn to speak a first language isn’t related to, or helped by, classroom instruction). But the fact that kids who started French Immersion in 7th grade are just as good as those who started in kindergarten surprised me a lot. This is a program that deliberately tries to teach less in a structured classroom way, and more the way you would learn a first language. (It doesn’t do it incredibly well, though–I went through French immersion, could read and write competently and speak stiltedly by the end of eighth grade, backslid a bit during high school due to limited class hours in French, and only became fluently bilingual in university when “immersed” among actual Quebecois Francophones.) I had massively more trouble trying to learn a third language, but this is probably mostly because a) it was Chinese (more linguistically unrelated), and b) the time thing–I thought an hour a day was a ridiculous and unrealistic amount of time to spend, and what I actually spent was more like fifteen minutes.
Kids definitely have more time, but otherwise they don’t necessarily learn languages easier. Or at least, secondary languages.
Wow. This article managed to surprise me. Not the fact that kids aren’t any better than adults at learning things deliberately, class-room style–I suppose I thought they would be worse at this, but better at unstructured learning-from-stuff-happening-around-them. (I suppose I thought this because the way that young children learn to speak a first language isn’t related to, or helped by, classroom instruction). But the fact that kids who started French Immersion in 7th grade are just as good as those who started in kindergarten surprised me a lot. This is a program that deliberately tries to teach less in a structured classroom way, and more the way you would learn a first language. (It doesn’t do it incredibly well, though–I went through French immersion, could read and write competently and speak stiltedly by the end of eighth grade, backslid a bit during high school due to limited class hours in French, and only became fluently bilingual in university when “immersed” among actual Quebecois Francophones.) I had massively more trouble trying to learn a third language, but this is probably mostly because a) it was Chinese (more linguistically unrelated), and b) the time thing–I thought an hour a day was a ridiculous and unrealistic amount of time to spend, and what I actually spent was more like fifteen minutes.
Thank you for new information!