Belgian kids know English before their first lesson

In Flanders, English does not start at school until secondary, at twelve or thirteen. So a team of researchers tested 780 Dutch-speaking children at ten and eleven, before a single lesson, on English listening, reading, speaking and vocabulary. The study is De Wilde, Brysbaert and Eyckmans (2020).

On average the children already knew a few hundred English words. The average hides the real finding, which is the spread. Some scored near zero.

Others were at a level you would expect after years of classes, and a sizeable minority could hold a conversation. Same age, same schools, no lessons, wildly different English.

Where had it come from? The kinds of exposure most strongly linked to proficiency were gaming, using social media, and speaking English with people. Watching subtitled television and reading were linked too, but less strongly.

The study measured associations, not causes, and a child who already had some English might pick the gaming server over the picture book. Still, the pattern is hard to miss: the children who did things in English, with other people, in things they cared about, were the ones who learned it.

Nobody meant to teach these kids. They wanted to understand the game, the video, the friend online, and the language came in with it. Thousands of hours of understood, wanted input, and a language at the end.

That is the lesson for an adult, and it is a demanding one: the input has to be something you actually want, and there has to be a lot of it. I am not going to tell you a story app is a multiplayer server.

But a book you want to finish is the same shape of motivation, and it is a shape you can fit into a day. Aloglot reads you one, in the language you are learning, with every word explained on a tap, and if there is no book about what you are into, it will write one.

Sources

• De Wilde, Brysbaert and Eyckmans (2020). Learning English through out-of-school exposure. Which levels of language proficiency are attained and which types of input are important? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 23(1), 171–185.