LEARNING A SECOND LANGUAGE AND THE DEVELOPING BRAIN
INDUSTRY INSIGHT
CHILD DEVELOPMENT
SPONSORED CONTENT
LEARNING A SECOND LANGUAGE AND THE DEVELOPING BRAIN
Teaching a second language to children is a joy ! At Montessori Centre Academy , children start learning Spanish when they are 5 years old . The school combines the Montessori philosophy : brain-based teaching methodology with hands-on materials that kids can touch and manipulate while using their left and right brain . Children learn Spanish by touching , for example , an apple then the color “ red ,” feeling the color or the apple while repeating the word . They have the visual , the auditory , and the sensorial together . Then movement and songs are added , which help the students to learn words in a fun way !
The child ’ s brain is different from the adult brain in that it is a very dynamic structure that is constantly evolving . A two-year-old child has twice as many synapses ( connections ) in the brain as an adult . The young brain must use these connections or lose them . Thus , failure to learn a skill during a critical or sensitive period has important significance .
With an ever-evolving world , the United States now has the second largest Spanish-speaking population in the world after Mexico , with more than 50 million native speakers and second-language speakers .
Some of the benefits of learning a second language at an early stage are the positive effects on intellectual growth as it enriches and enhances a child ’ s mental development . The child uses different parts of the brain which otherwise are not used . Parts of the brain that are used specifically to learn a language shrink as we grow .
Dr . Susan Curtiss , Professor of Linguistics at UCLA , who studies the way children learn languages , notes that in language development there is a window of opportunity in which the child learns that first language normally . After this period , the brain becomes slowly less plastic , and by the time the child reaches adolescence , the brain cannot develop “ richly and normally any real cognitive system , including language .”
The four- or five-year-old learning a second language is a “ perfect model for the idea of the critical period .” According to Dr . Curtiss , “ the power to learn language is so great in the young child that it doesn ’ t seem to matter how many languages you seem to throw their way ... They can learn as many spoken languages as you can allow them to hear systematically and regularly at the same time . Children just have this capacity . Their brain is just ripe to do this ... there doesn ’ t seem to be any detriment to ... develop ( ing ) several languages at the same time .”
Learning another language leaves students with more flexibility in thinking , greater sensitivity to language , and a better ear for listening .
The auditory skills are enhanced when learning a new language , specifically with the pronunciation of Spanish where every single letter is pronounced in a different way than in English .
When learning grammar rules , a child improves the understanding of his / her own native language , as rules are different . Children realize at a very early age at Montessori Centre Academy that the noun is the leader in the sentence , where the article and the adjective follow the noun in both gender and quantity . They learn that some nouns are female nouns and some are male nouns . This grammar rule questions their developing brain and children start thinking and even determining the article according to how well it sounds with the noun .
A child gains confidence and develops the ability to communicate with people s / he would otherwise not have the chance to know . I love when students come to class telling me the experience they had in a chess tournament where their counterparts were from Mexico and how they shifted the game to Spanish and learned to play chess using Spanish words and made friends with children from Mexico . All because they heard them talk in Spanish and started a conversation . This for a child is priceless .
I also love hearing adventures of how they helped their parents when traveling to Spanish-speaking countries . And how , visiting a Mexican restaurant in Pittsburgh , they ordered their own food in Spanish . Children take pride in using what they learn at school , and we encourage them by role-playing different situations .
About the author : Paola Motschman has been teaching Spanish at Montessori Centre Academy since April 2012 . She is a native Spanish speaker from Colombia and has three children ages 10 , 7 and 5 .
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