I disagree with the proposal for introducing English education to elementary schools.
A global education association TESOL Quarterly reports that generally children master their
mother language by the age of 12. What would happen if they are taught Japanese and
English at a same time, when they haven't even mastered Japanese?
Unlike other languages, we have three ways for lettering, Kanji, Hiragana and
Katakana. Because of that it is said we need 3 more years to master Japanese. In
2005 Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation conducted research to know how many
children can write Kanji correctly and it turned out 20% of the elementary school children
couldn't read Kanji which they are supposed to be able to read. In response to this result
some educators insist that we should consider ways to learn Japanese first, before we
consider English education into elementary schools.
For above reasons I totally disagree with the proposal for introducing English
education into elementary schools. It is not too late to start learning English after they
master Japanese perfectly. "If you have strong foundation in your mother language
it will be beneficial to learn second language such as English", TESOL Quarterly says in
their report. Mother language can be a basis when we learn foreign language and
therefore we should not underestimate the importance of Japanese but should set a great
value on it.