Extended Response

The statement ‘The benefits of additional language learning are limited, and not worth the effort’ is false because some children grow up with different languages that are spoken around them, even if it is not spoken by their parents they will learn it. Additional language gives educational benefits of learning foreign languages to children at young ages. There are many positives to a bilingual child growing up that isn’t for educational purposes. Different children have different characteristics of learning languages themselves so it might be easy for them to learn a second language or it could be difficult for them to learn another one. One more factor contributes to learning another language depends on the nature of the additional language being learned and the difficulty.
Children all over the world will learn any language that their family and friends speak around them. In today’s society it is rare that a child will grow up to know only one language because most communities are bilingual or multilingual and there are around 6,000 languages in the world with only 196 countries, so more than one or two languages is common in a country. Additional language learning for children educates their understanding of foreign languages, learning a new language teaches them something about the nature of languages and is knowledge that is needed in a literate person. It gives flexible thinking to children so they have a better understanding of how language works and they can differentiate form from content/meaning which is crucial to our everyday thinking. Bilingualism and reading readiness teaches children about nature of languages and is the sort of knowledge that literate people need to develop. Linguistic awareness which means the child is better able to judge grammaticality of sentences so they can understand grammatical rules, and can detect word boundaries better than monolingual children who only grow up learning one language. Children are all different so they have different characteristics and it might affect their learning of another language. The benefits of being bilingual aren’t just for education purposes; it can help in issues to do with trade, security, tourism and business so it is a very marketable commodity. Most countries have a multilingual and multicultural population so being bilingual or multilingual would give those people advantages in language. Children are all different so they have different characteristics and it might affect their learning of another language. The child’s personality, motivation, attitude, intelligence and many more attributes have an effect whether or not they will easily pick up a new language.
The nature of the additional language being learned depends on where the learner is starting from. It would be harder for a language that isn’t closely related to be learnt by someone since the patterns are different. The vocabulary would be very unfamiliar, both in form and content and grammatical structures. Another aspect is the difficulty of the additional language; some languages are harder to learn than others, this is because of the sounds that are produced in every language. English has 44 sounds and Hawaiian has only 13, whereas another country has around 156 sounds. The grammar and sentence structures are different and could be confusing to people learning the language.