How to Learn Languages: Children’s Brain Development
My brother-in-law sent me this article about helping your child’s brain develop from NPR. These are some interesting factoids from the article:
- Babies can differentiate syllables and new sounds from very early on, but there are ways for parents to help their children develop their language skills faster and more efficiently.
- Language is acquired quite well before the age of 6, but trying to force your children to read before the age of 4 is an effort that doesn’t work very well because the brain is not very well-equipped to tell the letter ‘b’ from the letter ‘d’ and so on…
- “The most simple way is to talk to your baby and around your baby a lot,” says Aamodt. “And the other thing that parents can do is to respond when the baby speaks, even if the baby isn’t forming the words correctly or you don’t understand it. Just act like some communication has occurred — smile and give the baby a little pat — and that encourages the baby to continue to try to communicate.”
- And children who grow up in bilingual households have a distinct advantage over their peers…
- “Kids who learn two languages young are better able to learn abstract rules and to reverse rules that they’ve already learned,” says Aamodt. “They’re less likely to have difficulty choosing between conflicting possibilities when there are two possible responses that both present themselves. They’re also better at figuring out what other people are thinking, which is probably because they have to figure out which language to use every time they talk to somebody in order to communicate.”
The full article is here. Here’s another NY Times article on Bi-Lingual Babies and the latest research on how Bi-Lingual babies sort language.
p.s. We used these foreign language DVDs when our kids were young. These were the best ones I found at that time. What are your favorite foreign language DVDs for kids?
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BEST #OWNVOICES CHILDREN’S BOOKS: My Favorite Diversity Books for Kids Ages 1-12 is a book that I created to highlight books written by authors who share the same marginalized identity as the characters in their books.