Early English lessons can benefit children in the long term

A research team has investigated how English lessons in primary school affect language proficiency in secondary school. The findings of the study were published in the journal Systems.

Children who started learning English in the first grade of primary school performed significantly better in listening and reading comprehension in grade nine than children who started in grade three.

The study was a continuation of an earlier paper that covered only the duration up to the seventh grade and found no such learning benefit. The study included data from nearly 3,000 students who took part in a longitudinal study conducted in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, between 2010 and 2014. The same data was used in a previous study, the results of which the researchers published in 2017. ,

At the time, he compared two peers, one of whom had started an English lesson in class one, the other in class three. In classes five and seven, they compared the two peers in terms of reading and listening comprehension in English. The new analysis included another set of data collected in 2016 to measure the English performance of the same children in Class IX.

A previous study found: Children who started English lessons earlier in primary school performed worse in reading and listening comprehension in Class VII than children who didn’t start English lessons until Class III. However, the new analysis showed: In ninth grade, early beginners in English fared better than late beginners in English.

Additional background variables such as gender, language of origin or cognitive abilities may not account for the difference between poor performance in seventh grade and late learning gains in ninth grade. “We believe that the most plausible explanation is that the lessons after the transition period in secondary school are increasingly adapted to the needs of children who begin taking English lessons at an early stage,” Nils Jekyll, formerly at RUB, now concludes at the university. Why Oulu?

“This explanation is consistent with research that considers the transition between school types to play a significant role in the long-term success of English language education across school boundaries.”

With this in mind, it is important to optimize didactic coordination and alignment of English classes at the intersection of school types. Furthermore, it may be that students in the long run benefit from more implicit language lessons in elementary school.

“We see an overwhelming need for research into detailed factors for successful language education, and we recommend well-coordinated, evidence-based interventions in educational policy as a whole,” the researchers said.

read all breaking news , today’s fresh news And Ukraine-Russia War Live Updates Here.