If you’ve ever watched a young child play a complex game of make-believe, or ask question after question about a simple topic, or explore the natural world with pure wonder and excitement, you know that early childhood is a magical time in a child’s life.
Young children have an amazing capacity to learn, to adapt, and to accept new ideas and perspectives with ease — much more naturally than teenagers or adults.
That’s because from infancy until the age of 12, a child’s mind is incredibly flexible — the brain has not yet set rigid knowledge paths, and it can constantly pass from one mental structure to another.
This makes early childhood the perfect time to learn a second language.
When children learn two or more languages from a young age, they widen their realms of perception and attention, creating linguistic structures that will benefit them all their lives. The bilingual child is a better student, performs better than average, and acquires the intellectual skills and qualities that educational institutions and businesses value.
The lifelong benefits of a bilingual education that begins in childhood include:
- Greater cultural awareness
- Increased reading comprehension
- Better at focusing and making decisions
- Stronger performance on standardized tests
- Higher average salaries in adulthood
The benefits of the bilingual brain
Why French?
- French is spoken by 125 million people in more than 40 countries.
- French as a foreign language is the second most commonly taught language in the world (after English).
- Most American universities require knowledge of at least one foreign language.
- French is the second most-studied foreign language in U.S. higher education institutions (after Spanish).
At the French American School of Princeton, our challenging, creative dual-language program prompts children to speak fluently, think differently, and adapt easily as they become critical, independent thinkers and well-rounded global citizens.