The foreigners resident in the US have the massive advantage of having the opportunity (and need!) to use English out of class; but they have the massive disadvantage of being adults. A middle school student who moves to another country will become fluent. But a move at the end of middle school will probably result in an accent.
Added, years later: Fluency has nothing to do with accent. It’s true that adults get accents. But it is also true that adults learn languages faster than children.
Yes, a child will pick up a second language quicker than an adult will, but the child will also tend to lose his or her first language unless he or she continues to use it. I base that belief on the experience of my father, who moved several times between two language communities in his childhood, and every time he moved he had to re-acquire the language of the community he was moving to. Once he became an adult, he retained both languages (but his English had some peculiarities even though it was the language he started out speaking), but it still cost him a great deal of learning time to become bilingual even though he started the process at a very early age.
My father never developed a taste for fiction. Or team sports. Or the pleasure that a human being can get from helping someone, e.g., visiting a sick friend in the hospital to keep the friend’s spirits up or buying a box of cookies from the pair of Girl Scouts who have knocked on your door. If you do not cultivate the ability to take pleasure in something that humans have a natural potential to take pleasure in as a child, it is almost impossible to cultivate it as an adult. It seems to me that there a lots of things for a child to learn more important than a second language if the child already knows English. (It’s different if the child’s first language is Swedish or some other language without a huge literature and huge community of speakers.) E.g., learning to draw or to play a musical instrument.
Also, if an immigrant to the U.S. is earning $40,000 a year instead of $60,000 a year because his lack of fluency in English makes him a less valuable employee then it is almost as if he is paying $20,000 a year for the opportunity to practice English in his workplace. And if a boy who has just moved to the U.S. or moved back to the U.S. does not speak English well enough to befriend someone who will help him learn to play whatever team sport the neighborhood kids are playing, then missing out on the experience of playing that sport is one of the costs of having the opportunity of practicing his English with the neighborhood kids.
My point is that I assign little expected utility to teaching children who already know English (or Spanish or Mandarin, which also have huge literatures and huge communities of speakers in countries with plenty of economic opportunity) second and third languages as if they were gateway skills like algebra, probability theory or introductory physics, and I was surprised to hear someone as well-informed and free of false beliefs as Phil Goetz recommend it.
Of course, if we know the child will move to a place where the second language is the main language, that is different.
The foreigners resident in the US have the massive advantage of having the opportunity (and need!) to use English out of class; but they have the massive disadvantage of being adults. A middle school student who moves to another country will become fluent. But a move at the end of middle school will probably result in an accent.
Added, years later: Fluency has nothing to do with accent. It’s true that adults get accents. But it is also true that adults learn languages faster than children.
Yes, a child will pick up a second language quicker than an adult will, but the child will also tend to lose his or her first language unless he or she continues to use it. I base that belief on the experience of my father, who moved several times between two language communities in his childhood, and every time he moved he had to re-acquire the language of the community he was moving to. Once he became an adult, he retained both languages (but his English had some peculiarities even though it was the language he started out speaking), but it still cost him a great deal of learning time to become bilingual even though he started the process at a very early age.
My father never developed a taste for fiction. Or team sports. Or the pleasure that a human being can get from helping someone, e.g., visiting a sick friend in the hospital to keep the friend’s spirits up or buying a box of cookies from the pair of Girl Scouts who have knocked on your door. If you do not cultivate the ability to take pleasure in something that humans have a natural potential to take pleasure in as a child, it is almost impossible to cultivate it as an adult. It seems to me that there a lots of things for a child to learn more important than a second language if the child already knows English. (It’s different if the child’s first language is Swedish or some other language without a huge literature and huge community of speakers.) E.g., learning to draw or to play a musical instrument.
Also, if an immigrant to the U.S. is earning $40,000 a year instead of $60,000 a year because his lack of fluency in English makes him a less valuable employee then it is almost as if he is paying $20,000 a year for the opportunity to practice English in his workplace. And if a boy who has just moved to the U.S. or moved back to the U.S. does not speak English well enough to befriend someone who will help him learn to play whatever team sport the neighborhood kids are playing, then missing out on the experience of playing that sport is one of the costs of having the opportunity of practicing his English with the neighborhood kids.
My point is that I assign little expected utility to teaching children who already know English (or Spanish or Mandarin, which also have huge literatures and huge communities of speakers in countries with plenty of economic opportunity) second and third languages as if they were gateway skills like algebra, probability theory or introductory physics, and I was surprised to hear someone as well-informed and free of false beliefs as Phil Goetz recommend it.
Of course, if we know the child will move to a place where the second language is the main language, that is different.