Some experts believe that it is better for children to begin learning a foreign language at primary school rather than secondary school.Do the advantages of this outweight the disadvantages?

Nowadays, being able to speak foreign languages is considered one of the main advantages of human being. As speaking is a crucial factor some people do support the idea that, teaching foreign languages should be started since primary schools, while others are against of this idea and claim that children should focus on other basic subjects at primary schools.

To begin with, we cannot deny that, children can learn foreign languages in simple ways at primary school. For example, in an attempt to enlarge children’s vocabulary teachers can ask them to write down five new words from which children use daily and learn them by heart for the next class and through discussions this method will surely work. In addition, during secondary and high schools pupils are usually overloaded with lots of stuffs of other subjects which is also difficult to study and starting to learn a foreign language from the beginning would create additional difficulties.

On the other hand, there is also a belief that, during primary school children are not psychologically ready for learning foreign languages as they are not fluent in their own native languages. Therefore, children are less likely to obtain a good command of foreign language at primary schools which necessitates them to concentrate on their native language as well as other basic subjects. For example, a pupil who does not know the meaning of some certain words is surely likely to face challenges to find its translation in foreign language.

In conclusion, taking both sets of arguments I strongly agree that children should learn their basic subjects as well as their native languages during primary schools. However, teaching some simple words and rules of foreign languages for children would also be a reasonable way of forming their elementary vocabulary.