WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF LEARNING A SECOND LANGUAGE AT A YOUNG AGE?

What are the Advantages of Learning a Second Language at a Young Age?

Clay Cavanaugh

Muskingum University

Education 112

25 November 2019

What are the Advantages of Learning a Second Language at a Young Age?

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There are many diverse languages spoken in the world today. Spanish, French, German,

English, Japanese, Chinese, Latin, Arabic, Russian, and Portuguese are some of the most

common languages. There are many more languages in addition to those listed. To be able to

speak more than one of these languages is very impressive. The ability to use two languages in

everyday life is called bilingualism (Byers-Heinlein, 2013). Bilingualism is already common

and is still on the rise around the world with one in every three people being bilingual or

multilingual (Byers-Heinlein, 2013). In California, it is projected that in 2035, 50% of the

children enrolled in Kindergarten will have grown up speaking a language other than English

(Byers-Heinlein, 2013). It is very important that many people can speak more than one language

because it helps with travel, employment opportunities, potentially speaking with extended

family, maintaining a connection to family culture and history, and could lead to making new

friends with different backgrounds (Byers-Heinlein, 2013).

With all the general advantages to being bilingual, what are the advantages to learning a

second language at a young age? I’ve decided to explore this question as learning a second

language at a very young age has always been interesting to me. In high school, I took two years

of Spanish and two years of French because both languages fascinated me. These languages were

interesting to me because they are the languages that are spoken in the countries that border the

United States. My high school also hosted many foreign exchange students in my four years

there and the lack of a language barrier surprised me. These exchange students had been studying

English since they were young and the fact that they could come to an American school and be

able to do well was amazing to me. While schools in Europe teach multiple languages starting at

a young age, most school districts in America do not have opportunities for elementary students
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to learn a second language. I am curious to know what the advantages are of learning a second

language at a younger age as opposed to learning a second language when a student is older.

The two most common terms used in referencing language are the terms “bilingualism”

and “fluency.” Although they have similar connotations, they have two different definitions. The

best way to differentiate the terms are to think of bilingualism as being able to think in either

language easily and being fluent as occasionally reviewing the language (Norman, 2017). Being

fluent in a language is a great goal to have but being bilingual should be the overall goal

(Norman, 2017). Being bilingual is viewed as important by institutions because of the

advantages that come with knowing two languages. For example, a College of Arts and Sciences

changed their curriculum to include foreign language as a required general education credit to

reinforce the idea of internationalization as a priority and to prepare their students for a diverse

world (Thompson, 2014). This allows students to either continue learning a previous learned

language or to start learning a new language.

There are many cognitive advantages to learning a second language. One advantage of

being bilingual is that bilinguals appear to perform better than monolinguals on tasks that involve

switching activities and inhibiting previously learned responses (Byers-Heinlein, 2013).

Bilingual people also have certain advantages with social understanding (Byers-Heinlein, 2013).

After observing bilingual and monolingual preschoolers, it was concluded that the bilingual

students had better skills in understanding others’ perspectives, thoughts, desires, and intentions

(Byers-Heinlein, 2013). It was also observed that the young bilinguals had enhanced sensitivity

to certain features of communication, more specifically the tone of voice (Byers-Heinlein, 2013).

This can have a huge impact on society if the students start understanding the perspectives of

other people that are different than them.

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Dr. Antonella Sorace from the University of Edinburgh commented on the advantages

that bilingual children have. Dr. Sorace stated to the American Association for the Advancement

of Science in Washington that “Bilingual children tend to have enhanced language abilities, a

better understanding of others’ point of view, and more mental flexibility in dealing with

complex situations” (Connor, 2016). The two possibilities of why these cognitive advantages

appear are because the brain is regularly switching back and forth between the languages and the

constant practice of training the brain (Byers-Heinlein, 2013).

Similar cognitive advantages have been shown for young students in early musical

training (Byers-Heinlein, 2013). Early musical training and second language learning are very

similar but the bilingual advantages previously listed is more valuable than musical information.

Similarly, many of these cognitive advantages are seen in adults who are learning a second

language or who already speak two languages (Connor, 2016). The biggest advantage for older

people who are learning or have learned a second language is the delay of dementia.

A study conducted by Dr. Sorace came to the conclusion that dementia was delayed in

the bilingual patients rather than the monolingual patients. For the study, Dr. Sorace put retired

people through intense education courses for a week. Dr. Sorace found that the brain responded

more in a language course than any other course (Connor, 2016). Just like the study that Dr.

Sorace conducted, similar conclusions have been made about the intensive training. A short

period of intensive language learning can regulate attentional functions that all age groups can

benefit from (Klimova, 2018). The intensive language learning is described as approximately

five hours per week of dedicated studying to the language (Klimova, 2018). Learning a language

throughout aging is very necessary because older people who stay mentally and physically active

are less likely to become depressed or cognitively impaired, like being diagnosed with dementia
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(Klimova, 2018). This study was important for many reasons. First off, governments cannot find

pharmaceutical solutions for dementia, so they are now encouraging older people to learn a

second language as a non-pharmaceutical solution to delay dementia (Klimova, 2018). Secondly,

it is harder for older people to learn a new language because their ability to reason and problem

solve are weak as well as their short-term memory are affected in the course of aging (Klimova,

2018).

It is very important to balance the exposure of the language, especially with the younger

students. According to Krista Byers-Heinlein and Casey Lew-Williams, “The average infant

sleeps 12 hours per day which is 84 hours per week. One afternoon (~5 hours) is only 6% of the

child’s waking life. This exposure is not enough.” (Byers-Heinlein, 2013). The concept of a

balanced exposure does not mean a part-time nanny or a visit from a relative on the weekends

who speak the language. These types of exposures are not enough for the child, or anybody for

that matter (Byers-Heinlein, 2013). A balanced exposure does not guarantee the knowledge of a

new language because the child will pick up on what language is spoken the most in their

surroundings and will learn the most used language (Byers-Heinlein, 2013). It is vital that the

surroundings of the children, more specifically infants, that are learning languages have lots of

exposure to sounds, words, and grammar of the desired language.

Quality and quantity are two very important concepts of learning a language. Quality

refers to how many words are heard per day from a language and quantity refers to how much

the child is exposed to the language (Byers-Heinlein, 2013). Another important note about the

surroundings of a child learning a second language is that social interaction is crucial and that a

language is not readily learned from television (Byers-Heinlein, 2013). Social interaction and

applying the language in real life helps with the development of any language because it is real
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life practice. Learning a language from television deprives a child of the real social interaction

and does not help with grammar concepts of the language.

The different strategies of teaching a second language to an infant include one-person-

one-language, one-language-one-place, alternating days, alternating morning/afternoon, and

flexible use of the language without fixed rules (Byers-Heinlein). In the one-person-one-

language strategy, one person speaks one language and another person speaks another language.

In the one-language-one-place strategy, one language is spoken at a specific place while another

language is spoken at a different place. In the alternating days strategy, a different language is

spoken on different days. For example, Spanish may be spoken on Sunday, but English is spoken

on Mondays, followed by Spanish again on Tuesday. The alternating morning/afternoon strategy

involves speaking one language in the morning and another language in the afternoon. The last

method is allowing flexible use of the language without fixed rules. This means that you can

speak whatever language you feel comfortable using at any point in time. There is no restrictions

on when, where, or who is speaking a specific language.

In 1999, researchers believed that teaching a child a second language before they have

mastered a first language would result in double semilingualism (Norman, 2017). Double

semilingualism is when the child is not mastered in neither the majority language or the minority

language (Norman, 2017). Double semilingualism is not a bad thing, but there will be a lot of

code mixing involved. Code mixing is when words are mixed from different languages in the

same sentence (Byers-Heinlein, 2013). This concept is very common in children learning two

languages because if they do not know a word in one language, they will replace the desired

word with the word in a different language. Current research contradicts the theory of double

semilingualism because the evidence for this claim is unfounded (Norman, 2017). Current
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research also states that there is evidence to suggest that people may never become fully

bilingual if the learning of the language starts after age ten (Norman, 2017). So when is the best

time for a child to learn a second language? The time model of a child’s brain development is

crucial for educators to know and understand. It is very difficult to teach a child after their

critical period. The critical period is the point in time in which humans are incapable of

mastering a language after a certain age (Byers-Heinlein, 2013). Researchers disagree on many

things about the critical period. They mainly disagree on what age the critical period begins or if

the critical period exists (Byers-Heinlein, 2013).

Starting from one month to six months of age, an infant can make sounds from all

languages but the infant will only learn to talk from the sounds and words from their

environment (Norman, 2017). From this point until age twelve, the brain acts like a sponge in

which the child absorbs foundations for their thinking, language, vision, attitudes, and aptitudes

(Norman, 2017). This point is said to be the critical period by many researchers because after

twelve years of age the windows and fundamental architecture is complete for the child

(Norman, 2017). Other researchers say that the critical period is at ages six or seven, but

regardless of the age of the critical period, the message is still the same: Start language

development at the youngest age possible (Norman, 2017). “The take home messages about

bilingual language exposure is clear: more is better, and earlier is better,” said Krista Byers-

Heinlein and Casey Lew-Williams (Byers-Heinlein, 2013). It is still possible to learn a language

after the critical period, but being a simultaneous bilingual has more benefits than being a

sequential bilingual. A simultaneous bilingual is a bilingual who learns two languages from birth

while a sequential bilingual is a bilingual who learns a first language followed by a second

language later (Byers-Heinlein, 2013). Simultaneous bilinguals have better accents, more
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diversified vocabulary, higher grammatical proficiency, and greater skill in real time language

processing (Byers-Heinlein, 2013).

Immersion programs are a unique way of helping young students become bilingual.

Immersion classrooms are classrooms in which the second language is not a topic of the class but

is incorporated through the lessons. For example, math would be taught in a foreign language.

Math is the topic of the class, but the students are also learning a second language through the

material. These immersion programs are all over the world and their overall goal is to encourage

bilingualism, biliteracy, and multicultural proficiency among both languages that are taught at

the Immersion school (Byers-Heinlein, 2013). Immersion classrooms do not rival infant’s

language environments in the aspect of quantity, but they help tremendously with functional

bilingualism and skills with the language that helps the kids later for education and professional

qualities (Byers-Heinlein, 2013).

The work of an immersion program in Beijing, China has confirmed many cognitive

advantages first hand. The immersion program, called 3e, educates their students in both English

and Mandarin Chinese (Soderman, 2010). They noted that the children are driven to a higher

level of cognitive flexibility than monolingual children, the children become more aware of the

meta-linguistic structures of language, and that young children are fully able to handle

bilingualism without becoming developmentally delayed in language (Soderman, 2010).

I conducted my own survey to find out when students began to learn a foreign language. I

was able to randomly survey 120 students from Muskingum University by sitting near a dining

area on campus. I was able to complete this random survey without bias by asking every student

that walked through the door into the dining area if they would like to fill out my anonymous

survey. I surveyed students at Muskingum University because students at this age are able to
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reflect on their education before college and remember what classes they took in their previous

education. To conduct my survey, I had each student fill out a slip of paper with a total of three

questions on the sheet. These three questions were:

I. Did you take a foreign language at all during your previous education? (Circle one) Yes

or No

II. If yes, when did you begin to take it? (Circle one)

Elementary (K-5) Middle School (6-8) High School (9-12)

III. If yes to the first question, how many years did you study the language?

________________

Each participating student was to circle if they took a foreign language class during their

previous education. This was to see how many students had experience with mandatory learning

of a foreign language because if they had taken a foreign language in their previous education,

they would have had to complete assignments for the subject, thus learning the language. As

inferred from the survey, I did not ask what language class the participating student took in their

previous education. Diverse languages such as Spanish, German, French, and American Sign

Language are commonly offered in the United States, but for the purpose of this survey, the

specific language that a student learned was not relevant. I am more focused on when the student

studied the language and for how long they studied the language. If a student had not taken a

foreign language in their previous education, then they would have been done filling out the

survey after the first question. This is because the two questions that followed were only to be

answered if a student had taken a foreign language class in their previous education. I asked

when a student had taken a foreign language to see if schools are emphasizing learning a foreign

language at a younger age. I grouped them into three different age ranges, Elementary (K-5),
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Middle School (6-8), and High School (9-12). I divided it into these three ranges because I feel

that they are the most common groupings. When discussing the school system, it is very rare to

talk about one specific grade. The grades are typically grouped together because of the variety in

age ranges that go along with it. My last question was to be answered if they took a foreign

language and pertained to how long they studied the language. I wanted to see the demographics

of this question because I wanted to investigate if a student really learned the language or if they

learned the basics of the language.

The chart above is a representation of how many students took a foreign language class

during their previous education, before coming to Muskingum University. From this sample, we

can determine that a huge majority of students studied a foreign language before coming to

Muskingum University. I was not surprised to see that 7.6% of the sample did not take a foreign

language class through their previous education. 7.6% of 120 survey participants is

approximately nine people. The nine people that did not take a foreign language could have

either opted out of taking a foreign language or all went to the same school that did not require
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them to study a second language.

This chart is a representation of when the surveyed participants began to take the foreign

language. As seen on the graph, the majority of students (over 75 out of 120) started taking a
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foreign language during high school. Other than the students who did not learn a foreign

language during their previous education, the least amount of surveyed participants started to

learn a foreign language during their elementary education. The number of students who started

learning a foreign language in elementary is almost the same as the number of students who

started to learn a foreign language in middle school. This is surprising as I thought the difference

between these two categories would have been larger. I would have thought that more students

would have started learning a foreign language in middle school rather than in elementary
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school.

The graph shown above is a histogram that represents the number of students who studied

their second language for a certain amount of years. The x-axis represents how many years the
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participating students studied a foreign language and the y-axis represents the number of students

per year range. Although the numbers along the x-axis are not whole numbers, it still creates an

accurate representation. Some of the survey responses showed odd length periods of studying the

language such as three and a half years or one semester. Any response that included an extra

semester was counted as a half year of studying the language. That is why many responses are

included as decimal values. Some responses included outliers such as more than 12 years. These

outliers are due to some students continuing the study of the language through college. This

graph is a perfect representation of how students are not studying the language for long enough.

Many of the students surveyed only studied the language for approximately half a year to four

and a half years and then stopped learning the language.

The reason for the success from the immersion program in China is because everybody

knows that it is a group effort and that everybody plays a role in the language development of a

child (Soderman, 2010). This technique needs to be applied to every child learning to become

bilingual. The parents, teachers, nannies, caregivers, and even neighbors all play an important

role in helping the child to become bilingual. There is a negative perception that a child learning

two different languages at the same time from a young age can cause confusion and hurt the

child’s progress in language development. This concept is called language confusion (Soderman,

2010). This concept is easily countered by providing the child with qualitative and quantitative

exposure of both languages and allowing the child to communicate through code-mixing. The

amount of benefits there is for a child to be bilingual in today’s world is astronomical and all

schools should be providing the education of foreign languages earlier and for a longer period of

time.
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References

Byers-Heinlein, K., & Lew-Williams, C. (2013). Bilingualism in the Early Years: What

the Science Says. Retrieved November 6, 2019, from

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6168212/.

Connor, Steve. (2016, February 15). Learning second language can delay ageing of the

brain, say scientists. Retrieved November 7, 2019, from

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/learning-second-language-can-delay-ageing-

of-the-brain-say-scientists-a6873796.html.

Klimova, B. (2018, July 30). Learning a Foreign Language: A Review on Recent Findings

About Its Effect on the Enhancement of Cognitive Functions Among Healthy Older

Individuals. Retrieved November 6, 2019, from

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6077199/.

Norman, K. (2017, May 26). When Should a Child Learn a Second Language? Retrieved

November 6, 2019, from https://www.brainscape.com/blog/2015/06/when-should-you-

start-learning-second-language/.
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Thompson, R. J., Walther, I., Tufts, C., Lee, K. C., Paredes, L., Fellin, L., … Schlosberg,

L. (2014, December). Development and Assessment of the Effectiveness of an

Undergraduate General Education Foreign Language Requirement. Retrieved November

17, 2019, from http://mu.opal-libraries.org/login?

url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct&db=ehh&AN=99778275&site=ehost-

live.

Soderman, Anne K. (2010, May). Language Immersion Programs for Young Children?

Yes...But Proceed with Caution. Retrieved November 7, 2019, from http://mu.opal-

libraries.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct&db=ehh&AN=50262555&site=ehost-live.