Why Your Kids Should Learn A Second Language

From Early Childhood Education.

When you hear someone complain that East Indian or Chinese students often do better that everyone else, they might just be right. But why is that?

Well, it isn’t that they’re smarter because of their racial background. More likely it’s because they tend to be bilingual, trilingual and sometimes just multilingual in general.

For a long time, experts believed that being bilingual was a bad thing, that it could affect intellectual development. While there might be some “interference,” there is more than enough evidence to show that learning just a 2nd language improves thinking abilities and more, and even test scores for students.

In the U.S., about 21% of school-age Americans speak a non-English language at home. The number of people speaking a non-English language at home increased 140% between 1980 and 2007, to over 55M people, and the number of actual bilingual speakers aged 5 and up has more tan doubled from 1980 to 2007.

The number of Spanish speakers in the U.S. increased 211%, – an increase of ”23.4M more speakers -.