The posited benefits of early foreign language study are myriad. Many of them are well-documented in research. At Torit Language Center Montessori, we focus on three of the documented benefits in our teaching approach.
Children are born with the full lexicon of world language sounds. Experts agree that somewhere between the ages of 5 and 12, it becomes much more difficult to hear and pronounce sounds in a language to which there has been no previous exposure. The benefits sought by Torit in the language program, therefore, do not depend on the continuation of the language through elementary or middle school or even on the retention of foreign vocabulary. If, much later in life, students can access that native pronunciation from brain recesses when they revisit language study, we believe they are far more likely to be successful with that study and to incorporate that later language proficiency into their potential careers.
Executive functioning is a fancy term for "adaptability" or code-switching in the brain. It is thought to be related to the ability to multi-task. This is a valuable skill for any professional and is best learned in childhood. The code-switching comes from the ability to convert from thinking in English to thinking in another language. The abstract thinking required to understand that entirely foreign sounds or combinations of sounds have meaning to many people and can, gradually, come to have meaning to them plays into creativity and problem-solving.
Abstract thinking, a benefit of second language exposure, is often tied to math achievements. Focus on sentences structures and words in a second language often refocuses a child on sentence structure and grammar in a native language, leading to enhanced performance in literacy (reading comprehension).
