New Year - New Language - New Benefits for Your Child - by Beth Butler

New Year - New Language - New Benefits for Your Child - by Beth Butler: "Remember those language learning labs in junior high school? Those labs with headsets, the classrooms with written workbooks full of verb conjugation and a teacher who followed a curriculum vs. her students' capabilities combined to create absolutely the worst (and least) effective method used to teach a second language. That is why those of us who took languages back in the days of middle school being called junior high school remember just a few choice words (and probably pronounce them incorrectly!).

Today, as parents and as educators, we know the importance of raising our children to be bilingual. We see and experience this ever-shrinking world of ours and encounter endless opportunities to test our own bilingual skills. We know from recent research and the barrage of studies thrown at us that the secret to success is introducing the new language early in life. Why, even TIME and NEWSWEEK Magazines ran feature articles on the window of opportunity to introduce a new language is between birth and around the age of ten to twelve."