Scottish mother wins international prize for baby language program

February 15, 2010 by Shawn Douglas
Filed under: News

A Scottish mother has won an international prize for developing a language program for young children.

Fiona Moffatt, a Scottish modern languages teacher, wanted her newborn son Ruairi to be exposed to a foreign language at an early age.

Her search for young learner programs hit a dead end, however, prompting Moffatt, to start her own set of classes.

Moffatt, 33, started her own company called Lingobaby while on maternity leave with the hopes of being able to provide foreign language immersion to young children.

“”I thought — if I want this to happen I’m going to have to make it happen myself,” she told the BBC.

Moffatt started organizing classes in 2008 and later expanded to opening the Children’s Language Centre in Airth, reportedly the first of its kind in Scotland. The centre was opened with the knowledge that young children benefit strongly from hearing more than one language as they grow up.

“If children are exposed to the sounds of a language before the age of nine months, they’re much more likely to pick the sounds out at a later age,” said Moffatt.

“There are no expectations that they come out with French words, but often you can hear babies of about 15 to 16 months say bits of words like ‘bonjour’, ‘merci’ and ‘au revoir’,” she added.

The Children’s Language center focuses on French, but she told the BBC that she “would love to take on new languages” at the school.

Moffatt entered in a competition ran by the European Union’s Piccolingo campaign which aims to raise awareness of the benefits of learning a second language at an early age. The competition, ran though social networking site Facebook, encouraged entrants to describe their methodology for young learners. Moffatt won the prize which helped her buy new language books for the school.