AS PART OF the Government’s national language strategy, all primary school children will be receiving lessons in languages by 2010. But are such proposals sufficient? Experts are warming to the theory that primary schoolchildren are sponges for language learning, and that the earlier they are taught to become bilingual, the better the prospects for their long-term educational career.

Research involving children from ethnic minorities, conducted at the University of London Institute of Education (IoE), confirms that, for those as young as five, learning to write in more than one language at a time significantly increases the likelihood of getting good exam grades later on.

Dr Charmian Kenner, head of the IoE’s community languages research group, says that, in many cases, children who attended language classes outside of school hours to learn their mother tongue were five times as likely to get five A* to C grades in their GCSEs as other pupils. Kenner believes that the results demonstrate that all children, regardless of their ethnicity, have an aptitude for languages that should be capitalised on when they are young.

“Learning another language adds new dimensions to children’s knowledge of reading and writing,” she says. “It strengthens their cultural identity and fosters educational success. Our results support the Government’s aim of introducing more language teaching into primary schools, but we believe that the Government should also ensure that community language classes are given financial support. Ignoring bilingualism is an educational failure.”

Kenner believes that opportunities to encourage the learning of languages within communities are being overlooked.

“Young children are very capable of learning different writing systems, and this is an excellent way in which to find out how language works,” she says. “They gain tremendously from the positive attitudes to their bicultural identity at community language centres and this should be valued by the mainstream teachers. Unfortunately the opposite is often true.”

Studies of six-year-olds in London have provided proof of the relative ease with which they can not only recognise different scripts, but develop an understanding of how and why they work. A group learning Arabic could tell classmates that it is a language written from right to left, while children learning Spanish could distinguish the sound links that differ between languages. They knew, for example, that the letter “ i” is pronounced differently in Spanish.

“We also found that they were aware of visual characteristics of the script and were learning how to write the symbols accurately,” Kenner says. “In Chinese lessons, children must learn complex patterns for each character; Spanish requires a knowledge of accents; and in Arabic, they have to remember the placing of dots to differentiate between letters. All very different to English, but all valuable to their learning.”

The national language strategy aims to increase language learning from the age of seven. Before its launch, only one primary school in five was offering some form of language training, and then for little more than half an hour a week. French, German, Spanish and Italian are likely to remain the most frequently taught.

But many consider that the Government’s strategy offers fewer, not more, opportunities for children to become bilingual. In what is seen as a controversial aspect of the strategy, British children will soon be given the opportunity to opt out of languages at 14 so that they can focus on vocational subjects. Even before the strategy was announced last year, a quarter of almost 400 secondary schools polled in a survey were no longer describing languages as compulsory. Coupled with that, says Kenner, is the lack of availability of lessons in less popular languages.

Children who took part in the IoE research mostly attended community language centres, many of which were run voluntarily at weekends and had no link with mainstream schools. Often they presented the only opportunity for bilingual development at an early age. “Many linguistic minorities in Britain have had to establish their own community language schools where children learn the cultural traditions and literacy of the place of their origin,” says Leena Robertson, of University College Northampton, who studied the emotional and cognitive advantages gained by five to seven-year-olds learning three languages at the same time. “Whereas French or German are often viewed as advantageous to young learning, few studies have revealed the benefits of all literacy learning.”

The IoE is pushing for greater links to be forged between community and mainstream language teaching, and for more financial support to be made available to establish language schools. Failure to do so, it says, could prove detrimental.

“A lot of mainstream schools do not promote bilingualism in any way, and teachers are unaware that children attend supplementary lessons because there is no communication between the two types of school,” says Dina Mehmedbegovic, of the IoE, who interviewed ten Bosnian families as part of the study.

“Despite the Government expanding language learning to primary schools, many schools are still not giving out positive messages about bilingualism. Schools need to take steps to support language learning, which is an economic asset to Britain as well as an asset to the ethnic minority communities.”

National Centre for Languages: www.cilt.org.uk

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