A Critical Examination of the Beliefs about Learning a Foreign Language at Primary School

Already in the late 14th and early 15th century the Dutch humanist Erasmus
advocated the early immersion Ofchildren in the Latin language and Locke in
the 17th century suggested that French should be 'talked into the child'.

However, the claim that effortless language acquisition would be unlikely, if not
entirely impossible, after a certain period in life was brought to prominence in
the 1950s with the work of Penfield & Roberts. Based on processes in brain
maturation, neurosurgeons Penfield & Roberts (1959) and Penfield (1965)
proposed a critical time for language development after which language
acquisition would be difficult, if not impossible and that the best time to begin a
second language was therefore early in childhood. Much of the evidence came
from studies on aphasia where they found that after damage to the left
hemisphere of the brain, speech was most speedily recovered by children.

Greater plasticity of the child's brain was said to make this possible while after
the age of nine 'the human brain becomes progressively stiff and rigid'. Penfield
took this claim further and argued that the greater plasticity of the child's brain
would allow the child to learn two languages as easily as one:

"The units of one or more second languages should be given to the child
when he is young and his brain is plastic and ready for the direct method of
learning...There is a time to start language learning. It is early in the first
decade. The biological clock of the human brain cannot be altered by the
educator to suit the convenience of a high school curriculum." (Penfield
quoted by Jeanes in: Libbish B., 1964: 35)

Penfield suggested that languages should therefore be taught from an early age
by 'the direct method that mothers use' as a so-called 'switch mechanism'

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