Knowledge that does not come from experience is not really knowledge

Lev Vygotsky

 

What are the advantages of inviting the child to speak another language concomitantly with learning the mother tongue?

With the increasing technological advancement, globalization, exchange between people of different nationalities, cultures and languages, it becomes increasingly necessary to learn a second language.

From a very early age, the child begins to understand expressions, explanations, without realizing that they are not part of his mother tongue. This exposure occurs in a “natural” way, through movies, cartoons, TV programs, as well as in magazines, store names, supermarket product names, brands, on the streets, on the internet, in video games. computer, at airports, in our daily lives.

Considering the school’s role in the subject’s formation process, it is important to prepare the child for this multilingual and multicultural universe at the beginning of their school life, offering them an experience of these different types of knowledge and contact with other languages.

 

The main goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have already built. Men who are creative, inventive, discoverers. The second goal of education is to form minds that are in a position to criticize, verify and not accept everything that is proposed to them.

Jean Piaget

 

Cognitive neuroscience points out some periods of child development when they are more likely to develop skills, also known as windows of opportunity. We can take the opportunity to expand, or even improve, the acquisition of knowledge through stimuli, for example: vision has a good development phase from 0-6 years; language from 9 months to 8 years; emotional control from 9 months to 6 years; social skills from 4 to 8 years old and the second language from 18 months to 11 years old.

Learning opportunities are greatest during early childhood and at no other time in life will they be replicated.

During cognitive development, the child goes through several stages, evolving their skills, such as sensory capacity; voice recognition, faces, objects, locations; the understanding of emotions.

It is the connections between them that will really account for the incalculable amount of information that babies begin to assimilate as soon as they open their eyes for the first time. There are 100 billion neurons in the brain of a newborn, and 5 trillion nerve connections, which will reach 1 quadrillion in the first few months of life. Scientists say there aren’t enough genes in the species to determine such a large number of links. They are formed by experience, from the stimuli received and the hypotheses formulated by the individual in the face of a new situation. From the discovery of this extreme plasticity of the brain, which until the age of 4 reaches an activity that will never be repeated, scientists form the concept of Windows of Opportunity – very important for the future of Education. (SAMARA, 1998)

Thus, during this period, the child is extremely curious and constantly seeks new and diverse experiences. Taking into account that there are favorable periods for learning and that certain skills should be stimulated, it is important to understand that if they are not stimulated, they do not become impossible to learn, but it will be more costly for the brain.

Understanding of how the human brain works is continually evolving. The human brain, in different proportions, is constantly developing; therefore we must understand how our brain works, the necessary stimuli, the best period for such stimuli and apply them.

The interaction between genetics, experiences, culture and environment is essential for the brain and the child to continue to develop.

 In the popular view, being bilingual is the same as being able to speak two languages ​​perfectly; this is also the definition employed by Bloomfield who defines bilingualism as “the native control of two languages” (BLOOMFIELD, 1935, apud HARMERS and BLANC, 2000). Opposing this view that includes only perfect bilinguals, Macnamara proposes that “a bilingual individual is someone who has minimal competence in one of the four language skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing) in a language other than their native language” ( MACNAMARA, 1967 apud HARMERS and BLANC, 2000).

The terms literacy and literacy are two distinct processes. Literacy is a process in which children gradually build their literate practices, based on the social use of language. The concept of literacy in the English language is very similar to bilingualism, as mastery of the social use of the language is essential in both. Bilingualism and literacy favor each other, since bilinguals are exposed to a greater amount of information, social and cultural aspects of the two languages, which makes them literate in both languages.

In view of the new discoveries of neuroscience and cognitive development in early childhood, we can affirm the difference that is made in the learning and schooling of children, by making the offer of a second language available from an early age.