There are many advantages of learning a foreign language, but one that is often overlooked is that doing so can give you a better understanding of English itself.
Partly this is due to the way we learn our own language, in that we just tend to “pick it up” through being immersed in it every day, rather than making a conscious study of how it works. The way we understand the rules of English, for example, is very different to how we’d understand grammatical rules if learning French or Japanese, because even with an advanced level of English instruction across our entire schooling we can’t help but have a different perspective on our own tongue versus another we learned later.
By learning a second language, you can learn both the rules to the new language and figure out the rules to your mother tongue from a different angle. To learn a new language, you’re forced to learn about parts of speech and how they fit together. Knowing these in one language, you can’t help but extrapolate them into your first language.
In this way, learning a new language gives us something quite valuable – a new perspective on our own native language. By approaching English with this new, systematic understanding – of structures, rules, usage and grammar – we enrich our understanding of something we’ve previously taken for granted and known instinctively rather than intellectually.
CARS & STARS Online is a digital reading program designed to turn every student into a proficient and capable reader, with advanced levels of reading comprehension. The core reading strategies that underpin the entirety of the CARS & STARS Online digital reading comprehension program form an underlying instructional framework that recurs throughout every level and provides consistency of understanding and instruction for students and teachers alike.
The reading strategies in CARS & STARS Online perform a similar function to the rules we take on while learning another language. By approaching reading comprehension systematically rather than just assuming a degree of automaticity, we help our students by giving them a new perspective on reading – and a new range of skills to better interpret and enjoy text.
If you are interested in learning more about the CARS & STARS Online subscriptions and how they can help children to achieve better results, then sign up for a free trial to be an integral part of your child’s reading success.
