If you have a child at primary school they may have been offered the opportunity to study a language, usually traditional foreign languages such as French, Spanish and German.
Most children start learning languages at around Year 5 or 6 but starting at a younger age can mean your child grasps a language more quickly and, although a long way ahead, can lead to better results at GCSE.
When we’re looking to occupy our children with activities and keep them ‘busy’ how much thought do we give to the importance of learning a language? If your child is at primary school and has the option to study a foreign language in the classroom or as an extracurricular activity,have you taken it up? Learning a language is a valuable life skill that can help your child’s confidence and even future job prospects.
One of the most common enquiries we receive at 121 Home Tutors is for foreign language tuition, with most asking for French and Spanish, and a significant number of enquiries for children as young as 6 or 7 years. In the last few years, we have seen a gradual decline in the number of enquiries for French and German tuition for GCSE– this may be due to the fact that it was dropped as part of the compulsory curriculum in 2004. Instead, what we are finding is that parents and children want tuition for more ‘exotic’ languages such as Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. Maybe in part this is to do with the economic power of countries like China and Japan and where future job prospects might lie.
Here are just a few reasons we think learning a language is a good thing:
- Learning a language is a fun, confidence builder. If you start learning a language at a young age then you can get your children really excited about languages. Once they develop a love for the subject and see that it as easy as other subjects then they are more likely to want to continue studying it. This early passion for languages enables a child to see how they could use it in their life or future career.
- It’s a very valuable skill to have in the workplace. There are so many international companies now that having a foreign language skill can really help someone stand out in the job market.
- You can become multi lingual – some people think that you have to be born into a multi lingual family to speak more than one language. However, the language learning centre of our brain is incredibly receptive until about the age of 12. That means a child has the capacity to become fluent very easily if they start learning a language at a young age. You can begin basic language lessons and tutoring with a child as young as 4 or 5, many children of that age will happily learn to write and read in another language as they develop their English skills.
- It’s a great life skill. We can help our children escape the mentality that ‘everyone speaks English’ and give them the tools they need to travel and converse with people in different countries in their own language.
- Learning a language can help children with other subjects. Because of the way foreign languages are taught in the UK (learning verbs, sentence structure etc) it often helps children with English because they start to understand the importance of those elements in their own language.
Guest Blog By Alison Warburton 1-2-1 Home Tutors For more information click here