BABIES OFFERED LANGUAGE CLASSES A SMALL WORLD AIMS AT YOUNGEST.

Byline: JUDY O'ROURKE

Staff Writer

SANTA CLARITA -- A Santa Clarita company will offer Spanish, German, French and other language lessons to infants at a time when a study has criticized "Baby Einstein" and other learning tools for the very young.

Early exposure to foreign tongues plants a seed that blooms later in life, says Tara-Anne Johnson, owner of A Small World in Saugus.

"If they come in at 6 months old and stay for three months, are they going to remember it when they're 8 years old? Probably not," she said. "The longer they're in it, the more they'll retain."

A Small World plans to open its doors later this month, offering classes in Spanish, French, Chinese and Italian for children 6 months through 9 years old. The curriculum consists of songs, visual and tactile learning aids, games and structured play groups. Fluent native speakers who enjoy working with children take a three-day course to become teachers.

Classes are tailored to the attention span of pupils, with tots in tow for 45 minutes once a week and older children's classes lasting up to two hours. Johnson uses a licensed an established program, the Thibaut Technique, created 35 years ago.

The company's pitch targets parents hungry to enrich their children's lives and prepare them for the future -- even though claims that learning a second language boosts SAT scores and makes students better candidates for jobs later in life are not borne out by independent reviews of the program.

In fact, no long-term studies have been done to measure the effectiveness of the technique. Creator Francois Thibaut said some participants' parents credit the program for giving youngsters an appreciation for language, and more.

"Many of them said (the kids) were doing much better in math and science," Thibaut said.

Experts say the parents should pat themselves on the back.

"Factors that could account for higher-than-average (test scores) would correlate with parents who would be likely to enroll children in this kind of program," said Toby Mintz, an associate professor of psychology and linguistics at the University of Southern California.

Those parents may read to their children often and provide a highly enriched home life and exposure to other kinds of activities, said Mintz, who's researching infant language acquisition.

Evidence suggests that children are sponges for learning up to about 7 years old. And babies younger than 6 months learn sound patterns, but not meaning or syntax, he said.

Children at risk for having reading disabilities have benefitted from targeted intervention programs lasting 45 minutes a week, and Mintz, who is not familiar with the Thibaut Technique, said the kiddie classes could also provide some benefits.

"We don't know the details of how much retention there is, how often it will need to be reactivated, but it's conceivable 45 minutes a week will make a difference in this respect," he said.

"It's not going to do any harm," he said. "I think it's good to expose kids, even to a small degree, to foreign language. That gives them the information that there are other languages out there."

In a study released last week, researchers found that very young children may be transfixed by "Brainy Baby" or "Baby Einstein" videos, but their language skills lagged behind other kids who did not watch them. The researchers said children learn more from parent-child interactions.

Chet Johnson, a behavioral pediatrician and chairman of Pediatrics at Kansas University Medical Center (and who is not related to A Small World's Tara Johnson), said the program sounds like a good idea.

"If they have exposure to vowels, consonants and vowel-consonant combinations, it might be be a lot easier when they're a lot older to 'hear' those sound combinations," he said. "If children are exposed in a fun and interesting way, it would increase their capacity to learn that language later in a more formal setting."

A Small World's classes range from about $100 a month to $150.

Parents who need to stretch a dollar might choose to save the money instead for their children's college education, since the average annual in-state tuition cost for a public four- year college was $10,674 in 2004, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. According to The College Board 2001, the average tuition at public and private not-for-profit four-year colleges more than doubled between 1981 and 2001.

[e-mail]

[phone]