BILINGUALISM WOULDN'T BE THE PROBLEM THAT IT IS IF FOREIGN LANGUAGES WERE GENERALLY TAUGHT AT THE RIGHT AGE

C.-J. N. Bailey

© 1998 by Orchid Land Publications [9-11-98]

     The title is not as flip as it may sound to some.  What is said below is predicated on three premises--(1) the agreement among specialists that a child should learn  (say, at least one year) to read in that child's mother tongue; (2) that every child can easily learn a foreign language if exposed to it properly before the age of eleven, plus-or-minus two; and (3) that it is therefore illogical for most adolescents to begin the study of foreign languages in high school, i.e. during adolescence, when the language-learning ability rapidly declines for most people--and the ways the grammar is used (for this or that style) is what starts being absorbed in a more exact manner.
     The foregoing can be boiled down to saying that the study of a foreign tongue should be begun as soon as a child learns the reading principle in the child's own native language; foreign language should best be oral at all events.
     This is another way of saying that early education should, if not be "bilingual," at least include a foreign language.  If a given pupil is not a native-speaker of English, that pupil's foreign language would be English, just as the foreign language of native-speakers of English would be some other language--very likely that of the largest number of children coming to school as speakers of some other language than English. 
     Since non-foreign-language courses--arithmetic, etc.--would be in English, it would be well if non-native-speakers began those subjects in English on schedule--having had a preliminary year of learning to read in their native language to the extent this is possible--certainly in the case of the major foreign-language group(s).  Such children would study Spanish, for example, and native-speakers of English would study Spanish (or whatever); the only difference would be that the latter would be becoming native-speakers of Spanish while the native-speakers of that language would be becoming speakers of what at first was a foreign language--English.   Everyone would do the courses in English, but everyone would  in some sense be natively "bilingual." 
     High school could then be logically devoted, not to foreign languages for most adolescents (who would be losing the ability to learn a foreign language), so much as to other tools needed for today's technological society.  This rosy view contends that the problem of bilingualism evaporates when everyone is "bilingual" and foreign languages are not taught too late for most young people to learn them.