Becoming Something Different

For this blog on Becoming Something Different by Colleen Fairbanks, Penny Crooks, and Mary Ariail, I decided to write a think piece. This think piece I discuss the importance of language. Colleen Fairbanks, Penny Crooks, and Mary Ariail had an encounter with sixth-grader, Esmé Martinez, her school experience is described in interviews up until halfway through her junior year of high school. Learning a new language can be very difficult. For me, I started learning Spanish in my freshman year of high school. Besides English I could not speak any other language, besides the occasional Italian words I heard from my family. One thing I did realize when learning Spanish was the similarities between Spanish and Italian; some of the words are the same or very similar. This had me thinking, 'I wonder if other languages share this similar vocabulary.' To my knowledge, I saw that other languages don't always share the same vocabulary but the same principals, like la means the in the feminine form and el is the masculine. It is pretty basic, words that end in a are feminine and words that don't are usually masculine. You don't see these principals in English. After realizing this, I found it rather strange that people say learning Spanish is harder than learning English. The English language has no set rules, it's like a free for all; rather with these other languages there are rules you follow by, which benefits the learner in case they forget how to spell certain words. No wonder why students like Martinez struggled going to a new school and was trying to learn English. English is to an easy language, it is all memorization.
Learning any language is very difficult especially at an older age, thus I believe it is important to start learning in your younger years. We as educators can't expect high schoolers to grasp all the knowledge of a language when their mind has already developed a good amount. It is important to start learning in elementary school because this is when a child's mind is still developing and they are eager to learn. In Esmé's case she was learning at an older age and wasn't able to the English well. "Such frustrating experiences pointed out to Esmé where she had academic difficulties and contributed to her positioning of some teachers as not helpful" (Fairbanks, Crooks, and Ariail 7). Most of the time students end up learning these new languages in their older years in school, which if they have the correct support and help from their teachers and parents they should do just fine.
http://www.languagestars.com/program-overview/programs/parents-and-tots/14-programs/curriculum/66-the-benefits-of-learning-language-young.html