Issue No. V - 9/29/2007

Harvard Study Sheds Light on How
Children Learn a Second Language

The idea that children should learn Chinese has firmly taken hold in the
United States. There are nearly 50,000 students now studying Mandarin in
elementary and secondary schools in the US, according to published
figures.

How hard is it, you ask, for kids to learn Chinese? Recent research has
found that toddlers may learn Chinese, or any other second language, by
utilizing the same building blocks and developmental process that
babies use when first learning to speak. However, toddlers enjoy a much faster
acquisition rate for new languages. They’re much quicker than babies,
and, in many ways, more adept than big folks, too!

Seeking to discover how children naturally acquire a second language,
Harvard developmental psychologist Jesse Snedeker recently studied a
group of preschool-aged children who were adopted from China.

These children, who learn Chinese in their native country, often face an
abrupt transition to an all-English environment. Snedeker’s findings
revealed a surprising similarity between how these adopted children
learned their second language and how all children learn their first
language. Even more astonishing was the speed at which these little ones
acquired their second language.