Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Children should begin learning a foreign language as soon as they start school. use specific reasons and examples to support your position. =========================================================================== With the fast pace of globalization increasing the frequency of contact with foreigners, speaking English is regarded as a basic ability to survive and to work in the modern society. As residents living in this global village, learning how to communicate with others is our inevitable responsibility. I strongly believe that children should learn a foreign language as soon as possible, while opponents point out there are some drawbacks. On the one hand, proponents, like me, claim that children are willing to absorb all kinds of knowledge and their curiosity also accelerate the process of learning a foreign language. Educators and linguisticians indicate that if parents hope their kids have excellent language ability, they should never miss the golden learning period, before the age of five. Furthermore, children’s memory aptitude which is usually better than the old also plays an important role in remembering vocabularies, a foundation of language learning. On the other hand, critics think that the demerits of teaching a foreign language to young children is obvious. If children are forced to learn a foreign language they are not interested, they will feel depressed by complex grammar and lots of vocabularies. Besides, the heavy burden of learning English would deprive them of joyful and cheerful childhood, and this bilingual education would make kids confused about their native and foreign languages. However, I still believe that the opponents’ opinions are shaky. Because children living in multilingual countries, such as Switzerland and Canada, often have fluent pronunciations in speaking two or three languages, this is a concrete evidence that children have potential to learn different languages at the same time. According to the reasons I discussed above, I personally maintain that preschool children should start to learn a foreign language at their early age. If they lose this golden opportunity appearing only once in a life time, even a child prodigy must spare no efforts to compensate the loss. --

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