Learning English too early can hamper children

Referring the fervor with which parents send their children to so-called "bilingual kindergartens" or "kindergartens with entire English environments," linguists and educators said that learning English at an early age might harm children's mother-tongue acquisition. They were talking at a symposium hosted by the Foreign Languages and Literature department at National Taiwan University on Saturday.

The symposium, entitled "The Road to Internationalization -- the Future of English Education in Taiwan," invited 12 experts specializing in language acquisition and English instruction to discuss the issues of English education and the future direction of English education in Taiwan.

"The mother tongue plays an important role when learning a second language," professor of the university's Graduate Institute of Linguistics, Su I-wen (蘇以文), said at the symposium.

She said her research indicated that no matter what kind of approach was taken to learning English, children who had a good command of their mother tongues learnt a second language faster.

Although bilingual education is an attempt to connect basic education with the trend of globalization, Su said that if a good learning environment were not provided, it would increase the burden on children and encumber their performance in other subjects.