| Along with economical development and early-time intelligence development, the interest of Chinese learning English grows day by day. Many guardians hope their own children could contact English since childhood. Therefore, parents send their children to the kindergartens in which there are English classes. At present, children English education in our country becomes a hot topic in the foreign language education.Based upon the theoretical foundation of linguistics, psychology and physiology in foreign language learning for children, the thesis discussed the environment of foreign language learning as well as the traits of learners of different ages, the author thinks "critical period" hypothesis is not extremely reliable as the early foreign language education rationale lacks the support of massive experiences, moreover, the correlation research of psychology and psycholinguistics is also unable to indicate well that younger learners have the more superiority than the elder ones in learning foreign languages. At present it is not suitable to develop early foreign language education on a large scale in our country, if there is not superior bilingual environment for them.This thesis altogether is divided into five parts.Chapter One explains the background of children English-learning tide emphatically and reviews the history and present situation about the initial age for children to learn foreign language home and abroad.Chapter Two tells about theoretical framework of the research and mainly introduces Chomsky's language acquisition device, J.Piaget's cognitive development theory, "critical period' hypothesis, "non-critical period" hypothesis and total physical response. Chapter Three dwells upon the outset age of children's foreign language learning, explains the essential conditions of children learning a foreign language and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of different ages on learning foreign language.Chapter Four makes an analysis of the different age onset of the learners (100 students in Zhuzhou Industry College). An investigation has been made by taking the original scores of the subjects' College Entrance Examination and College English Test Band Four as raw data for statistics and analysis. The results indicated that the statement "the younger, the better" is not reasonable.In the final part, the conclusion is drawn that the best initial age of children learning foreign language is 11-15 years old. |
