This is one of the most important discoveries on babies' early language learning abilities. I've watched the following video clip over and over again for several hours, I make sure that I understand it at the best of my abilities.
There are a few points that I've summarized here to share with you all, some of them can also be find form the film itself.
1. According to what this new research discovers, the sooner we create a second/foreign language interactive /socially engaging learning environment for babies/infants, the better it is to their later language development. This includes the faster and more complex first language acquisition at the later stage (24 months, this film refers to in their research).
2. From the recent new neuroscience (MEG) available, phonetic learning is a "Pathway" to language implications for reading and disabilities. the sooner we can identify that a child has the language learning disability, the sooner we can help to address the problem.
3. Babies learning depends a lot on the social interaction, therefore, a foreign language DVD or audio doesn't really help an infant younger than 12 months old. This doesn't mean that a 30 months old's toddler would have no benefit of watching a foreign language DVD whatsoever. This is because the way a 30 months old's learning is different to that of a 6 or 7.5 months old's infant. Again, the social interaction plays a vital tool to their early learning as well.
There is no argument about it. I have seen a few hundred Melbourne families in the past 3 years that tried to learn a second language (when both parents only have one, English), and, with a great % of them gave up in less than 6 months and a further few % of them gave up in less than 12 months. This is largely because parents couldn't see pass the point that babies and young toddlers learn more than what they can reproduce and lots of the 'hear says' of: 'bilingual babies are often slow talkers' or 'bilingual babies are more easily to develop language problems because they get confused by two or maybe three languages that's surrounding them', which is not what this video has shown us.
4. Bilingual babies love socializing with peers and love to be in a group of adults and babies company. They are learning from such a purposely organized social interaction gathering. My 19 months old, for example, is putting 6 Chinese words together, (she surprises us everyday, when I just made a statement of she was using 4 or 5 words two weeks ago, she has out grown my expectation, again) and she is making sentences since long before she was 16 months old. This is largely because she is in my Mandarin bilingual Toddler learning playgroups 4 times a week (I am running 21 bilingual learning playgroups weekly, offering 3 languages). When she was barely 11 months old, one day, in the class, she repeated out loud of what the teacher said, the whole group of mothers of 14 to 20 months old toddlers cheers, no one expects her to do so (she was the youngest one in the group, I moved her from baby class to toddler's before 11 months because she won't sit still for flash cards anymore, like most of the other babies would). Because of this surprise she made and got recognized, from that day onwards, she loves to make and repeats sounds/words after everyone. Her counting skills in both Chinese and English follows a 'Yea' after '10'. I call her little parrot. She also recognizes Spanish flash cards and sounds, I never count how many Spanish words she learns during the weekly session, but she repeats after you as clear as she can be. English is the domain language at home because my husband speaks English ONLY until recently. He is now learning Mandarin with our third baby and he picks it up a lot more than in the past 9 years of our marriage all together.
5. From an individual's academic point of view to the benefit of a society, Early learning plays an important role. If we would like to see the preparation gap disappears maybe we have to make sure that the early learning stars really early.
Finally, I am very happy to say that all the way along, I've been doing the hard work of helping and promoting the early bilingual language learning, now, watching this DVD clip, has made me more strong at what I am doing and hope all of you out there who are not sure what to do or still not able to make up your mind of 'which' language to give it to your child other than English would stop wondering and gather all the act together, giving your child the best gift you can possible give it to him/her, starting an early language learning soon.
Remember, up until the age of 7 still is a good start, although the sooner the better. Babies are the citizens of the world (the beginning of Prof. Patricia Kuhl's speech)
