Kids Should NOT Learn Languages in School (here’s why)
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📚🏫Think kids should learn languages in school? Think again. In this video, I share my expert opinion and the science behind why teaching kids languages in school is not a good idea. How was your language experience in school? Let us know in the comments!
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As a non-native English speaker, I can tell you that I didn’t learn English at school, but through social media.
I’ve been learning English in school for 6 years now (I live in Serbia and attend school there) and I forget all the grammar immediately after I get the highest grade on the test.
I understand and speak English without any problems, although I don’t know what the Present Simple is.
The only time learning a language “in school” worked for me was when I studied abroad in Spain and that was only bc I had a Spanish bf there. Nothing to do with the class part.
For me it was Japan but with a gf.
The language learning school model would do well to evolve and include applications and the story learning method.
I’ve got one for ya Olly. Think about the Deaf kids (100% non-hearing) who are expected to keep up in a class that teaches in English when they themselves sign in ASL which has a completely different grammatical structure. Instead of teaching them in SEE (sign exact English) which would be more beneficial mentally. Now that’s a dilemma and a touchy subject for many. P.S. I’m a CODA (child of a Deaf Adult) and an ASL/SEE/PSE Interpreter. I am able to Transliterate and speak Spanish as well.
If I had a deaf kid, I’d learn ASL and cue, not SEE. And I’d cue all my spoken languages.
In my district, SEE is the only instruction method “authorized.” So, please aware cueing during instruction time is not always an option.
So correct Olly ! I was in secondary school in the 1970’s, and language teaching was terrible. I easily read books usually in French and sometime in Spanish and Italian. However I am hugely limited in conversational ability because I am mostly self taught. Such a waste were those school years lessons ! I am 63 now and believe that with wonderful online resources people my age can get huge rewards from starting to learn a foreign language . I am convinced it is a gymnasium for the mind..
I do feel like people appreciated languages a lot more in the past though, even at school age
Fully agree with all of this. People saying he didn’t do his research should do there’s. I am born and raised in the Spanglish zone of the US. Failed Spanish and English throughout all of my schooling. As an adult I can mostly understand Spanish when spoken to me. But it’s only Mexican form Spanish from northern Mexican states and US southwest. Different Spanish accents completely throw me off. Also I can’t respond in Spanish. I respond in Spanglish. Had and still have no interest in learning Spanish. Even getting in trouble for not learning my heritage language. Not interested. But I teach myself Japanese now and then cuz I have always been interested in Japanese culture. Yeah kids can sponge knowledge but they have to want it.
They have to want it and have the right conditions 👍🏼
日本語の勉強を頑張ってください。
For every success story in the comments there will be a hundred ones that yielded no results. I think everyone knows this fact anedoctally, most of the population just doesn’t benefit from those classes, the numbers speak for themselves. This being a language channel is just going to draw more of an audience that had better experiences on average.
As an ex-kid, I can attest that what Olly said is true. When I started learning English 26 years ago, most of what I did was read graded readers and watch tons of cartoons. The class was there to supplement and clarify what I consumed of native materials.
and yet every public school does it. I went through spanish class for 4 years and never came out even conversational. Since then I learned 2 languages by myself and speak them fine.
I did 2 years at a community college back in California in the early 90s and likewise didn’t come out conversational. I ended mastering Japanese in Japan because I was very interested in the language.
Yeah, it really shouldn’t be mandatory. It’s just not something you can learn effectively if you aren’t super interested in it. And even if you are, odds are that those classes just won’t fulfill your needs anyway as they have to keep a slow pace so that everyone can get passing grades. It’s just a waste of everyone’s time like many other things in the education system.
Olly, it depends how intensive your language program is. I went to bilingual schools K-12, and English took up one or almost two hours a day up to 6th grade and then, AFAIR, 4 or 5 periods per day. Call it semi-immersion. Everyone in my school left it with a good level of English.
My English was so good from an early age that I went to a camp in Canada at age 7 and had no problems communicating with the other kids. And I was already reading English books back then.
I took Spanish from ages 10 to 16. When I decided to jump back in at 36, my former education made every bit of difference because I had the foundations already.
My family lived in both Japan and the Philippines while my father was in the Air Force. I was a baby and a toddler at that time, so I wasn’t speaking much or just gibberish in English. My brother, however, ended up learning to speak in Japanese and Tagalog, simply by being around native speakers.
I took Spanish for 3 years and it made me really sad. the teacher who really wanted to let us learn through input and conversations wasn’t allowed to because that’s not the curriculum she was given
Sometimes school is the only opportunity for a kid to begin his/her language learning journey. Coming from a financially difficult background with no internet I was over the moon when I learned we were going to get the opportunity to learn English (German was the mandatory one to study but I always gravitated towards English). And me knowing basic English set me on a life path that would hardly have been possible otherwise.
I teach Latin. Our curriculum stets at 4th grade. I have come to the conclusion that it’s literally impossible to teach a language to an unwilling student. The brain trying to decipher meaning from message is critical.
1. Students should be able to select what language they want to learn.
2. It should be fun and easy and natural.
Most students not only don’t learn whatever language they sit through for 4 years but they end up hating language learning AND think they are bad at language acquisition.
Hook them on anime or K-pop. Make them fall in love with French food or Italian art. Expose them to German philosophy or Russian literature. Follow their interest and encourage it and expose them to the language.
I had a choice… just between Spanish and French… Spanish was cool but I just really wanted to learn Portuguese and Russian.
My daughter started learning Korean on her own just because of her love for K-Pop.
In Germany, I had the choice between French and Latin as 3rd language in 7th grade. I wanted to learn a language that I could speak and so I chose French and I loved it. But then the rules of chosing courses in Germany forced me to also take Latin from 9th grade onwards and drop French after 10th grade. So I ended up with 4 years of French and 5 years of Latin. I’m mad to this day.
I started learning English at school when I was ten. I picked the language up fast, but not so much because I had good teachers. It coincided with access to cabel-TV, Hollywood blockbusters, television programs and pop music.
I learned Japanese and German in high school and treasured the experiences. Did I reach professional proficiency in 2-3 years? Nothing like it, but I got out of myself, saw the world through new eyes, and made some friends. I later studied Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hawaiian, Hebrew, and now Uyghur (among others). Not everybody will become an interpreter and not everybody needs to.
Why not teach languages? In Finland, children are taught Finland’s two official languages, Finnish and Swedish, as well as English and one optional language (which can, for example, be French, German, Spanish, Portuguese or even Chinese). After graduating from basic school, Finnish children know four different languages at the age of 16 (i.e. those two native languages, English and one optional). And this Finnish model has been successful and arouses interest so that foreign researchers and teachers have visited here in Finland to study how we do it (a foreign researcher sitting at the back of the class and taking notes on how the teachers taught us was not a rare sight in my own childhood), and it only makes us Finns even more proud that our children are taught languages at school.
Scandinavians have fantastic English. I don’t understand how we know how to teach languages faster and more efficiently, yet still insist on doing it the same old way in schools
You bring up a good point. I think this video is addressing the British and American schools, where his dismal stats came from. Whereas he brings up I think, for example, the research for the effectiveness of learning though other subjects came from research on canadian students (where also most anglophone students taught french the standard way have poor results as well). Also, I’ve seen that teachers in finland generally have masters degrees, whereas in the US elementary ed are generally BA with some of the lowest test SAT/ACT scores of any major (other than social work), yet there are still teacher shortages, so lower education has a very different priority in US society
Our family of English speakers live in Iceland. Our six-year-old sometimes came home from preschool describing being fully exhausted from spending the whole day in a language that’s not her first. What made her Icelandic finally take off was a new friend moving in next door who didn’t speak English and had no interest in speaking English. Amazingly, our two-year-old is starting to pick up the language too, just from hanging out near her and her friend. Finding their own motivation and need was the key.
Subjecting the kids to “five years of mind numbing boredom” means they are less likely to be attracted to learning a language later on.