Languages have been a source of communication and expressing oneself for centuries. As of 2009, there were nearly 6909 languages spoken all over the world!
Learning a foreign language can have immense benefits for everyone, especially in today’s digitized and constantly evolving world. Being bilingual can help you connect with people from various countries and cultures. This connection can lead to you forming deeper and long-lasting connections and helps make you a member of a larger community, a global citizen.
Although learning a foreign language is not that easy, especially for adults, because learning a new language requires one to change their cognitive and thinking models, and it can get hard to think in a language you know nothing about. However, with the right tools and study methods, children in primary or elementary school can become fluent in a second language far quicker than adults.
There’s an alarming shortage of foreign language learning programs and education in the U.S compared to the region on the other side of the Atlantic. As per research conducted by the Pew Research Center, a median of 92 percent of European students learns a foreign language in school. According to a survey conducted by American Councils for International Studies in 2017, only 20 percent of k-12 students are enrolled in foreign language courses.
Keep reading this blog to know more about how learning a foreign language can help change your child for the better.
It Can Improve Reading Skills
Reading is one of the core requirements to improve and excel academically. Your child’s reading abilities can improve if they learn a foreign language. According to studies, that knowledge of a second language gives children an advantage in learning to read, and if they already know how to, a foreign language education can help them reach advanced reading levels.
Children Gain More Confidence
Children are curious by nature and tend to look at new opportunities as fun activities and approach them with a positive mindset; unlike adults, children don’t think of learning a foreign language as extra work.
As children learn languages in an interesting and fun environment, accomplishing to learn the language will give their confidence a boost.
Display More Empathy
Learning a foreign language helps children become more receptive and accepting of people from other cultures. Children who are bilingual tend to be more empathetic towards others compared to children who don’t study a second language.
Improves Brain Function
According to research learning, a foreign language can help improve children’s cognitive flexibility among kids. Improved cognitive abilities include understanding, analyzing, and observing in a better way. Children who learn a second language are quick to realize that an object can have more than one name and description compared to children who are monolingual.
Learning a foreign language helps children become fluent in it, and this helps them switch from one language to the other conveniently. Such children find it easy to focus and alter their responses depending on the situation.
Knowing a second language gives your child’s brain the boost it needs to perform well in their educational journey and helps them enhance skills like critical thinking, listening skills, and problem-solving abilties, along with improved concentration, memory, and multitasking, and creative abilities.
Exposure to multiple languages is an excellent way to flex a child’s brain muscles. It can increase the density of grey matter in their brains which is responsible for sensory and speech perception as well as processing information and memory.
Able To Maintain And Build Connections
Learning more than one language is a great tool to form connections and friendships with people from other cultures and countries. Bilingual children won’t feel hesitant making friends in new places and the common language will help them have deeper and long-lasting relations.
Exposure to multiple languages also boosts cross-cultural understandings because language and culture are intricately connected. It helps provide insight and deeper understanding of how different people view the world.
Helps To Improve Musical Understanding
Knowing a foreign language can help train the child’s ear for a better understanding of music. In tonal languages, one word can have several meanings, which depend on the pitch and infliction of the speaker’s voice.
This difference in voice and tones can help a child identify various pitches and improve their musical understanding and also help them get better at playing various musical instruments.
Learning A Foreign Language Nurtures Creativity
Learning a foreign language gives a child a larger view of the world and can increase their ability to think out of the box. It nurtures creativity and boosts curiosity which is crucial to view problems from several angles, which helps to improve problem-solving abilities.
It Helps Improve Test Scores
Studies have shown that fluency in more than one language can help students achieve better grades in their quizzes and tests. These tests not only include those conducted in school but standardized tests, like SATs as well.
The higher scores are directly related to the years spent learning a foreign language.
Reach Out To Ideal School To Enroll Your Child In A Professional Online Bilingual School
If you’re searching for a quality but affordable, online bilingual elementary school, then we have got your back. We are an interactive, virtual school with a two-way immersion program for English and Spanish.
Whether you want to enroll into the full curriculum of an online learning elementary school or just professional online language classes for your child’s foreign language goals, Ideal School is the right fit for you. We also offer live Open Houses, which feature free online demo classes for students and parents who’re interested to know more about our school and teaching methods.
The Ideal School offers world-class lessons with trained, experienced, and qualified faculty; the teachers and students interact in real-time in an engaging and interactive classroom environment. Teachers give live feedback and make corrections if and when necessary.
Get in touch with us right away to know more about our teaching methods and to enroll your child in a bilingual school.
