From the mother tongue to the second language

Abstract

Learning a second language, in addition to the mother tongue, helps to significantly improve the maturation and cultural education of the child, and to enhance its expressive and communicative skills. The 85 New Programs for the Primary School, emphasize the need to strengthen the pupils’ ability to make linguistic relationship with various interlocutors using the language in its variety of codes and its main functions. You need to direct the child to take account of extra-linguistic elements (situations, characters, topics, roles) as a fundamental condition for understanding texts and to produce oral and written messages, in relation to cognitive situations. On 1 September 2012, the Minister Profumo issues the New Indications, maintaining continuity with the previous ones. They assume an intercultural aspect, which concerns, not only the presence of foreign students in the classes, but also an open attitude towards the world and the reality of which the younger generation will be part. In recent years, mankind has achieved a considerable progress in the field of mass communication, the economic and cultural exchanges with different peoples and in the field of science and technology; hence the use of foreign languages is becoming indispensable tool of modern man, open to a broader vision of life. In this regard, school is primarily called to make its contribution, because it first must fulfill these needs, as an institution to which it is specifically entrusted with the task of preparing the new generations in society. So the early teaching of a second language is possible, as long as you lay down clearly achievable goals and implement a suitable educational mediation. In addition, to know how one acquires a language, you have to observe the evolution in the period of growth of the child since he is infant and, above all, the relationship between language and thought.