Psychology(Cognitive Development in Children): What are the pros and cons of teaching students a foreign language at primary school Justify, the extent to which you think the New Zealand Education system should require all students to learn a foreign lan - Essay Example

the part of the students due to their lack of familiarity with foreign words, a lot of research studies suggest the need to teach the primary school students a foreign language as their preparation for the study of foreign language as they reach the secondary school level. (Larson-Hall, 2008; Martin, 2000) To enable the readers to have a better understanding with regards to the importance of integrating the learning of a foreign language in the curriculum of primary schools, the advantages and disadvantages of requiring the primary schools to teach students foreign languages like Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, French and/or Spanish among others will be thoroughly discussed followed by examining the extent wherein New Zealand Education System should require students to learn foreign language in primary schools.

disadvantages. Among the most important advantages of teaching the primary students a foreign language is that each student is given the opportunity to be able to develop awareness, acceptance, and appreciation of foreign languages and other cultural issues beyond their own culture and traditions (Martin, 2000). In line with this matter, the study that was conducted by Larson-Hall (2008) revealed that three to twelve year old students who receive minimal exposed of less than 4 hours each week learning a foreign language are caoable of getting a higher score than students between twelve or thirteen years old who received foreign language exposure in secondary schools in terms of having a better phonemic measures.

Aside from having a longer learning period as compared to students who started learning a new language at secondary schools, primary school students are carefully guided by their second- or third-language teachers. Upon examining the impact of allowing primary school students to learn a foreign language, Schoonen and Verhallen (2008) confirms that primary school students who learn a foreign language have a wider vocabulary of foreign words as