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Just one more essay that I wrote for IELTS topic about the benefits and drawbacks of learning foreign languages at primary school. After the essay I will show how I used collocations.
Just to remind, you can benefit from IELTS online course and develop all the four skills there, including writing.
Now, here’s the topic:
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 outweigh the disadvantages?
Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your knowledge or experience. Write at least 250 words.
And the essay:
Many educators claim that children will benefit if they start studying a second language earlier than high school. I entirely agree with this view, although certain professionals voice worries that a foreign language could harm children’s mother tongue.
Those who oppose introducing foreign languages into primary school curriculum support their view with several arguments. First, certain paediatricians contend that early exposure to a foreign language can damage pronunciation features in the native tongue. Second, some parents worry that their offspring may get confused, not being able to differentiate between several language systems. Third, some teachers assert that schoolchildren need to master other, more important subjects, such as mathematics or writing, which means that children will merely not have enough time to study a foreign language.
Despite those concerns, numerous scientific studies provide ample evidence that the earlier children get exposed to a foreign language, the better they develop intellectually. Not only do they master other tongues more easily than teenagers due to flexible myelin structure in their brain, they also consistently display improved cognitive skills, better memory and higher test results for other subjects compared to schoolchildren who never learned a foreign language. In addition, reliable scientific experiments disprove the myth that languages can mix and show that even infants acquire new languages as separate systems. For those reasons, I would argue that children do need to absorb several languages as early as possible, while their brains are still flexible, in order to boost their academic performance.
In conclusion, the benefits of foreign language studies at primary school have been supported by scientific research and far outweigh possible drawbacks.
In the essay, I tried to use various collocations connected with the topics of education and languages:
mother tongue
to introduce into curriculum
exposure to a foreign language
to develop intellectually
cognitive skills
to acquire new languages
to boost academic performance
