Why Kids are Great at Learning Foreign Languages

One of the questions that I hear most often - how is it possible for a child to learn English with a tutor who doesn’t speak their mother tongue? They wouldn't understand anything, right? Let me tell you why this couldn’t be further from the truth.

But first, I’d like to share my path to becoming a fluent English speaker.

When I was a kid, I went to a regular public school. English was an abstract subject not much different from math. Most of the lessons were conducted in my mother tongue. We learned how to write English letters and words, and we recited texts without much regard for their meaning. I still remember “London is the capital of Great Britain”. But one thing we were never taught was how to communicate and think critically in English.

Thankfully, there were two things that drove me to express myself in English.?

One was my love for Queen and Metallica. I learned all their songs by heart and I cared about their lyrics and about the meaning they conveyed. I even picked up a guitar to be able to sing these, but unfortunately, my musical skills made my audience run for their lives.

Second was my love for programming and early access to the Internet. I loved programming, I loved the thrill of creating something new out of a few lines of code (ok, usually it would take a few thousand lines :)

When I got into university there were no websites. All information was stored in FTP servers, which are essentially remote archives of files. There were all kinds of files, but mostly they were programs and programming documentation. There wasn’t much in terms of music or video back then. Still, to me, it was magical that I could be sitting in Europe and access FTP servers across the ocean in the US. It felt like teleportation back then!

And guess what - all this wealth of information was in English. The sheer volume of it forced me to improve my skills because my appetite for programming manuals was insatiable, but all the information was in English.

Still, my encounters with actual people who spoke English only happened when I came to the US to work as a graduate student. I was lucky enough to be able to quickly adapt and my experience with reading through countless programming manuals helped me to feel confident enough to start speaking English. Within the next few years, I evolved my skills to a near-native level.

All in all, it took me almost 20 years - from 5th grade in school to university to spending seven years in the US.?

Having English skills allowed me to work at first-class companies such as Google and meet legendary people including Sergei Brin, Larry Page, Marissa Mayers and Amit Singhal (original head of Google search). Later, it allowed me to start several international businesses of my own.

I want my kids to have this opportunity, and I feel that in the 21st century, our kids should have better ways to learn English than what we had back in the 20th.?

The first insight that I gleaned was from my own children - when they were young, they had no problem understanding unfamiliar languages. Kids are extremely adept at using non-verbal information to compensate for a lack of understanding of verbal spoken words.?

One interesting point many don’t appreciate - we don't fully understand 100% of the speech we hear in our mother tongue. Basically what you have is a speech understanding curve (see graph below). As we grow older, we understand more words that we hear, but it never gets to 100%. So, how do we cope? We use context to understand the message that is being communicated to us. Basically, we take adjacent words, visual queues and our expectations, and we subconsciously fill in what we didn’t quite make out or understand. It happens automatically, so we usually don’t even notice how it happens.

Well, kids are super-contextualizers. They have to cope with a much higher percentage of worlds they can’t understand than adults simply because their vocabulary is still limited and their auditory cortex is not fully developed.

A child’s superpower of being able to contextualise can and should be leveraged for learning a foreign language. At the extreme, it's leveraged when a kid is raised in a bilingual environment. At birth, we have no vocabulary to lean on, so 100% of understanding comes from visual and other sensory context.

Monolingual kids at 6-12 years old still retain this contextualising capability to a large degree. They are still able to quickly get over the uncertainty of not understanding a completely new language and engage with a skilled tutor, who knows how to use visual materials and physical gestures to convey messages, give instructions and in effect carry out a conversation in a language which is completely foreign for a student.

Steve Krushen, a world-renowned linguist, calls for a similar N+1 concept: to maximise language acquisition, students should receive as input a learning material at a level higher than what he/she can fully understand.

This insight is basically the foundation of a better way to learn English. Learning English in the 21st century involves going straight to the source, i.e. to a qualified tutor who speaks English fluently, and leveraging the super-contextualising ability of kids.?

This increase in perceptiveness in kids is supported by a research paper from world-renowned psychologist Steven Pinker and several co-authors, which suggests that kids who start before the age of 10 have better chances of becoming fluent speakers than kids who start at a later age.

Once you have tutors though, you have to ensure that the quality of the tutoring is consistent. We don’t want our students to be at the mercy of an individual tutor’s ability to organise an effective curriculum. Moreover, we want students to be able to switch tutors as they progress in their learning to get more exposure to different accents and styles of speaking.?

To make this a reality, modern technology enables a so-called Data-Driven Curriculum. How is it data-driven? As a child takes lessons with a tutor, we take detailed measurements of student achievements. We measure how well a student does across micro-skills, and then we use this data for two main purposes:?

1) To adjust each student’s learning path to correct for any difficulties in learning, and?

2) To adjust our curriculum to maximise achievement rates across all students.

We adjust a student's learning path in two ways. First, as a reactive adjustment, that is when we see that a student needs to improve a specific skill and we assign an exercise or an additional tutor lesson that develops this skill further. The second is a proactive adjustment. We use machine learning algorithms to predict that a given student is highly likely to develop difficulty with this particular skill and we assign extra materials even before the difficulty is developed.

What does this all mean for a parent? It means that you get clear reports on how well your child is doing, with a list of skills that they have developed, and a list of skills that require assistance. With a Data-Driven Curriculum, you can be confident that your child will progress since the content has been used and perfected by thousands of children who have successfully learned English before you.

Still, as a student progresses, the restricted nature of a student-to-tutor relationship becomes a limiting factor for learning. This is where student-to-student interaction comes into play.

It’s essential to include content that teaches kids to interact with other kids just like themselves from other countries. Just imagine your kids having buddies in Singapore, Saudi Arabia or Italy. I could only dream of this, and with new technologies, we are making this a reality.

Learning games that involve two or more students enable students to compete, collaborate and most importantly communicate and develop their first international human connections.? Students become a part of a global community where your kids can safely practice communicating across national boundaries.

My own kids and millions of other kids already stepped into the 21st century. They learn English in a way that I would never have dreamt possible when I was their age.?

What about you and your kids? Will you be joining us? Try a free trial lesson!?