With the fast-paced today, it is recommended that elementary school students should learn foreign languages besides their native language. While the demerit involved, I believe that the merit should be outweigh.
On the one hand, teaching other languages to primary children offers several drawbacks. First and foremost, pupils might already have a heavy academic workload in their schooling, and introducing foreign language learning could lead to overburdening the curriculum. For example, with a volume of homework and in-class assignments, young students may struggle to manage their timetable effectively. Subsequently, they might be stressed and exhausted in their study. Moreover, Finding qualified and skilled language teachers is a big challenge. Especially at the primary level, children have difficulty acquiring and comprehending new languages.
Despite the negative aspects metioned above, the students in elementary schools should be taught foreign languages is a positive trend. Firstly, by instilling a variety of languages pupils can achieve better academic performance. For example, children who start learning a foreign language in primary school have better language proficiency than those who start learning in secondary school, and their grades in other subjects are also significantly better than their peers. Another benefit is that they can develop cognitive and critical thinking skills. Communicating with multiple languages not only enhances the capability of remembering words but also applying the rules of arranging sentences. For instance, in the majority of nations in the world to begin writing sentences is from left to right, but in Arabic, it is the opposite which is from right to left.
To recapitulate, it seems to me that learning a second language as a part of the curriculum creates more pressure on elementary children, I firmly agree that it will bring more development in their cognitive ability and study results.