[EDLING:2243] More children learn more than one language

[Francis M Hult]

Via lgpolicy...

>   More children learn more than one language
> 
> 1/10/2007 8:06 AM ET By Beth Walton, USA TODAY
> 
> Azure Warrenfeltz is fluent in Japanese and Spanish. She also can
> understand bits of French, German, Arabic and Italian, and she soon hopes
> to learn some Mandarin Chinese. Azure is 4 years old. "I'm smarter than my
> father. He can only speak one language. Muchas gracias!" she says
> playfully. In today's globalized world, Azure is one of many young
> American children whose parents insist her education include foreign
> languages. "It's such a global environment now, you never know what you
> might need,"  says Azure's mother, Julie Warrenfeltz, who started
> schooling her daughter in foreign languages when she was 6 weeks old. "I
> wanted to make sure she had every tool and every benefit at her disposal.
> 
> "She couldn't hold a violin, she couldn't stand upright, but I wanted her
> to do something," says Warrenfeltz, owner of Petite Ambassadors Language
> School in Jacksonville. Not only is learning a foreign language easier for
> children than it is for adults, but children who are exposed to other
> languages also do better in school, score higher on standardized tests,
> are better problem solvers and are more open to diversity, says Franois
> Thibaut, who runs The Language Workshop for Children, which has nine
> schools around the East Coast.  Thibaut is a pioneer in foreign languages
> for babies and children and is the author of Professor Toto, an
> award-winning home-based foreign-language curriculum for parents and
> children. "When I started 35 years ago, very few people believed in this
> idea.  Teaching kids who are 6 months seemed crazy," Thibaut says.
> 
> Today, Thibaut says, his schools can't keep up with the demand for
> classes; about 1,000 students are enrolled and even more are on waiting
> lists. The schools even get requests from expectant parents wanting to
> reserve a space for when their child is born, he says. The schools serve
> students 6 months to 9 years old and offer courses in Spanish, French,
> Italian and, new this year, Chinese, which Thibaut says is becoming the
> most requested class. "More and more people are aware of the importance of
> teaching another language to their child because we are in a global
> world," he says. Language study for children is based on immersion, he
> says. Kids sing songs and play games to help develop language
> comprehension skills. "This is a natural way of learning language."
> 
> When children start learning languages at birth, they have the capacity to
> learn many languages at once without getting confused because, as the
> brain develops, so too does the ability to separate one language from
> another. Warrenfeltz says that sometimes when Azure was younger, she would
> mix up vocabulary words, using the shortest word no matter what the
> language. But by age 3, everything fell into place. The word for
> "elephant" was too long and hard to pronounce in English, so at age 2,
> Azure would just say Zo, the Japanese word for the animal. "It was clear
> to her what the objects were, but it was just so hard to enunciate, she
> would just pick the words that were the easiest,"  Warrenfeltz says.
> 
> Warrenfeltz's school takes students as young as 6 weeks in a course called
> Baby Boot Camp, which combines foreign language with strength training,
> balance and coordination exercises. She, too, has seen the demand for
> language classes grow in the past few years. One of the reasons Anna Lynn
> and Stephan Oppenheimer of New York enrolled their daughter, Mireille, in
> Thibaut's language classes when she was 6 months old was to help her
> understand diversity and learn how to see things from different
> perspectives. They also hoped the language lessons would help their
> daughter appreciate her heritage; her grandmother is French. "We both
> believe that could be a great gift to give our child," Anna Lynn says. "As
> Americans, we don't typically study other languages, and that can make us
> narrower in our perspective."
> 
> Warrenfeltz's two younger children, Indigo, 2, and Raymond, 1, also are
> learning foreign languages. "It's amazing; you never know what is going to
> come out of their mouths,"  she says. "You'll see them walking down the
> road counting in Chinese or pointing to things in Arabic. "I would hope
> that they would become ambassadors to Japan and all those wonderful
> things," but whatever Azure decides to do, languages will be an asset,
> Warrenfeltz says. "I'm just providing an opportunity so they can do
> whatever they want, wherever they want. They won't be bound by language."
> 
> 
> http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-01-09-language-children_x.htm