The Best Time to Learn English....or not.

It is without a doubt that it is a common belief that there is a window of opportunity, a period of sensitivity to develop certain abilities when one is still a child. In fact, there is enough research and evidence to support this. It seemed to everyone, even me, that it was the most rational thing to start them young.

This appeared to be particularly true for language development - people often agree that it is easier to pick up a language when you are younger. We attribute this ability directly to evidence that points out that children, like other organisms, have periods of sensitivity to develop certain functions that will become more effective if the stimulation and environment supporting that growth is generously provided during this period of sensitivity. A lot of people also believe that this ability to acquire language tapers off upon the onset of adolescence. But we can also argue that childhood is generally a time when an individual is less taxed upon their time, resources and energy.

However, more recent research has argued whether the belief that language becomes harder to learn with the onset of age has more to do with the psychological barriers learners have brought with them towards learning, a disadvantage generally thought to not affect children yet. On top of a more open and less cluttered mind, we seem to overlook the fact that in general, the life of a typical child affords them more time for learning and less taxed financial resources from their younger parents. Year after year, living expenses go up together with the pressure adults put on younger people to perform : a pressure, I firmly believe, which correlates directly to how dissatisfied an adult is with their own sense of underachievement.

After two years of purposefully experiencing and testing the notion that "the best place and time to help them is to start them young", I have reversed my opinion. I maintain all the reasons and logic I have made in the first place regarding my initial opinion. But I'm beginning to be aware that there are other factors, which are perhaps, very localised, that I have not considered its impact upon childhood learning of a second language.Children nowadays do not always have the time and energy that is essential to the sort of rapid absorption we associate with them. On top of that, the pressure to perform in school or the negative outcomes in experiencing language learning in school creates the mental and psychological barriers we normally associate with older learners.

We realize that most adults approach learning with a sense of trepidation and fear of failure or judgment. Past perceptions of failures creates the premise encouraging future failures. This is a condition well-noted in self-help books and cognitive psychology. Rolling back to their schooling days, most people exit school with a sense of relief and liberation that they got that over with. Once mandatory schooling is over and done with, they try and re-establish a new identity, exert more autonomy in their lives and empower themselves to experience the real world outside the prison they knew as school - the beginnings of which we can see clearly in the explosion of creativity and delinquency and unreigned expressions of liberal behaviour seen among college students.

As children grown into adults, they usually succeed in implanting a new image of themselves over the restrained identity they had had to endure during years in school. But when it comes to learning again later on in life, the cognitive and affective barriers are erected again, which is usually one of the factors impeding the maximum potential for adult learning. We now see this build-up of mental barriers which we normally associate with adult learners, happening in primary school children.

When primary school children approach learning out of a sense of failure or 'grades dropping', they are in almost the same mental state as an adult learner, thus negating any advantages we associated with children's language absorption.Parents wish to take advantage of a period of development where children can 'absorb like a sponge'. But we have to pause to recognize that even sponges have a certain capacity of how much they can absorb. Stress, worry, mental and physical exhaustion, repetitive drills and homework, restraining the internal conflicts between being who they are and what everyone else expects them to be - all these emotional exertions usurps the advantageous developmental capacities of a child.

Sometimes we unwittingly treat our children as accessories - or like containers we carry around with a hinged skull we can open up, fill in with some lessons and then simmer in that crock-pot. Those whose children do not end up cracked pots (or worse, crack pots) should count their blessings that their children are so resilient. It's really funny when we visualize it as a caricature but that is essentially what we're doing in practise . A child who is fearful, overthinking, understimulated or conflicted is cooking a broth inside their heads. If their cup, so to speak, is not empty, we can keep pouring things in and they flow out through another orifice. Nowadays, children's cup are overflowing with ridiculous drills and practices which are unexamined and worse, causes intellectual and emotional retardation. It should be acknowledged that every child has a different level of tolerance before they 'space out'. It is a matter of time before they do, causing them to tune out and turn away from learning.

I mentioned earlier how most adults become resistant to learning due to the strokes they have coloured their past learning experiences with. - Teachers are particularly good examples to illustrate how adults turn away and resist learning. They are good examples because, unlike most other adults, teachers are directly involved in the business of learning. Teachers nowadays generally have a bad rep - a ruinous reputation as autocratic, closed-minded, unimaginative bullies. (Having been both a student and teacher, I confirm my observation!) I suspect what happens is, with the reversal of fortune and now being given the seat of authority, teachers or people in the capacity of bosses, are most prone to drawing a kryptonite divide between themselves and others.

I've also noticed that the degree of how successful and autonomous a person in a managing capacity perceives themselves to be corresponds directly to how open they are to negotiations and further learning from others. In other words, the less confident a teacher or authority is about their own merits, the less open they will be to absorbing learning and the more likely they are to remain highly authoritative. (My very personal allegory - the kryptonite divide.)

It is true that the market for teaching children is the easiest to exploit and make money from. From a capitalist point of view, it makes most sense to advocate the 'get them when they are young' point of view. But is this capitalist point of view contributing to the spin of the rat race which is now engulfing a child's right to their childhood? When children space out, which may or may not be the fault of one particular type of lesson they are attending (usually, a combination driven by well-intentions which causes burn-out), all the King's horses and all the King's men.......

So, from a socialist point of view, we have to question whether the more time and money we are spending translates to more learning that is happening? There used to be a time when those who have money to spare pay for extras in life that schools cannot afford to provide. The irony nowadays is, people are paying and making time for extra lessons because schools are not providing the learning they are supposed to!

It seems very ironic, and sadly, the pawns at play are children and their mental and developmental health. If schools could deliver learning, then children will still have the sponge capacity to absorb additional learning. Right now, we are unconsciously already taking up that capacity through double missed-learning : You cannot learn enough in school so you have to (1) do a lot more homework and (2) attend a lot more school-based tuition given by the same school teachers. We can add the negative clutter of mental fatigue and personal conflict (children learn through play, not work!) to the sponge capacity we took for granted.

To recapitulate why I had reversed my initial belief that 'The best time to start them is when they are young, I would like to highlight an advantage teens and adults have which children don't. - Children do not attend foreign language lessons with the same sense of purpose and future-orientation that young people and adults do; unless they (linguistically talented children) come from very well-adjusted, accomplished families and this is a rarity across the world. Say we take away the advantage of their 'free learning'and 'sponge capacity' by cluttering the child's absorbtion with negative learning instead, can a child (undeveloped frontal lobe!)substitute their absorbtion with the sense of purpose and future-orientation more mature learners possess? Of course not. But that doesn't mean some parents don't try. However, pushing children to develop that sort of far sightedness ruins the natural and necessary present-orientation children need to pass through to develop into mentally healthy adults. Look what happened to Michael Jackson and other child-celebs and child-beauty queens.

Underachieving parents try and live vicariously through their children and in pushing them to 'think like adults', damages their life for good.A part of me worries when I teach young children - am I contributing to a loss of their childhood? Eventhough most teachers prefer teaching young ones, I realize I prefer teaching teens and young adults. In terms of my own ego and intellectual challenge, there is more at stake as I have more to risk being judged more discerningly by older learners. But the gratification comes from the fact that teen and young adults have the advantage of reflecting on their own learning and accept a reasoned rationalisation and thus responsibility to undo their past-negative perceptions and unhelpful beliefs they have held about themselves as learners.

We can argue that we can use the same fix-it for children, but we cannot compete with the many hours and many days they are still spending in school which will simply undo what we are trying to fix. Teen and young adult learners, on the other hand, not only have the autonomy to prevent the same conditions they experienced as younger learners but are empowered to make changes to their pace of life and environment to clear up clutter and make space for learning. After many years of questions about how to help others learn a language, I came to an unexpected conclusion : The best place to start is with the Adult, be it the adult learner, the adult parent or the adult teacher-parent. The way I see it, an adult who understands their own learning stigmas will also understand what they are trying to achieve with themselves as learners as well as their children or students as learners.

Instead of putting the hopes on their children or students to 'do better' for 'their own good', parents, teachers and adult learners can reclaim the sense of loss and self-esteem they seek to feel fulfilled in life. Not only can adult learners reclaim their confidence as learners, they can re-orient their lives with this new esteem and pass down the learning to their children or outsource learning more discriminately so that they can get the most value from their children's learning. This will give children and parents the freedom to not have to do everything to cover all bases, but have the confidence that the few things they do will bear positive outcomes. This doesn't mean that I desire to teach language awareness to adults, rather, my experience with teaching young children made me realize that there is so much more learning that needs to happen synergistically with language development. And that is where the role of the Adult in a child's life comes in - to learn about learning, so that they can better understand and contract out learning in a meaningful way.