First of all, to understand why it is believed that English is so important, we have to know the social context it envolves. After Mandarin, English is spoken by more people than any other language. It is spoken throughout the world. Moreover, we live in a society governed by the worldwide phenomenon known as “globalization”. Because of that, English has become the international language of diplomacy, business, science, technology, medicine, computing, tourism, etc. Then, if English is so important in our society, it should also be really important at schools. This is the current context, but the curious thing is that even years ago, people like Chomsky stated that learning other languages when in early ages has advantages for children. And we have to remember that also centuries ago, the wealthy people were really interested in learning Latin. So why should we not engage in the learning of the English language in early primary schools?
Once we know why English is so important, we can understand why English should be taught in early primary school. As we said before, English has become one of the most important languages in every part of the world, so children are probably going to need it in their lives. But learning a language is not a simple process, but a long and continuously process with different stages. Then, the earliest you start learning a language, the sooner you will be able to achieve every stage. For example, there are some sounds in English that are learnt when we are babies, others even when we still can not speak, others when we are five or six years old, etc. So if children do not start their language learning when they are young, the will miss some of these stages, and they will not be able to learn some sounds anymore. That means that they will not be able to get a proper English proficiency.
Furthermore, there are more reasons to uphold the statement that teaching English in early primary school is beneficial. There are a lot of surveys that support this idea we are talking about. One of them was made by Cummins as a response to the results in bilingual schools or schools where English was taught as a second language. Cummins stated that: “while many children develop native speaker fluency within two years of immersion in the target language, it takes between 5-7 years for a child to be working on a level with native speakers as far as academic language is concerned”. But he also believed that: “in the course of learning one language, a child acquires a set of skills and implicit metalinguistic knowledge that can be drawn upon when working in another language. It can be seen that the Common Underlying Proficiency (CUP) provides the base for the development of both the first language and the second language. It follows that any expansion of CUP that takes place in one language will have a beneficial effect on the other language(s)”.
In brief, we should remember that English is spoken throughout the world, and used in all the contexts. Therefore we can conclude that English should be taught since primary school because it is beneficial in different aspects, and because early primary school is the best stage to start learning a language.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Cummins, J. (1984) Bilingual Education and Special Education: Issues in Assessment and Pedagogy .
Cummins, J. (1994) The Acquisition of English as a Second Language.
The Primary English Teacher’s Guide. Penguin English Guides. England.
