How Learning to Code Can Help Children Improve Their English Skills

Coding is a great skill to learn from an early age. Not only is software engineering a great profession, but even just having good computer skills and digital proficiency is quite important today and is sure to be even more important in the future.

In addition to that, however, learning to code also brings a lot of cognitive and developmental benefits with it. That is why it is often recommended for kids, even if pursuing software development as a career later on isn’t a must.

A prime example of that is how learning to code can help children improve their English skills. If this doesn’t feel immediately intuitive, let us elaborate a bit more on how coding helps with language skills.

1. Improves language precision

A big hurdle kids have with learning proper grammar and punctuation is that they often don’t understand the point of being specific with their language and writing. However, coding languages are extremely specific and coding doesn’t tolerate any errors in its syntax, as even one misplaced comma will usually result in dysfunctional code.

As a result, learning to code is a great way to emphasize the importance of using precise language. It gives kids a more heightened awareness of language structure and how it works, which transfers to natural languages.

2. Teaches clear expression

A big part of coding is learning how to express complex ideas into simple and clear-cut step-by-step instructions that the computer can understand and implement.

This is a great skill to have in any language, not just in programming languages, as it greatly improves one’s communication with others.

As such, by signing up your kid for a course at Codemonkey.com or another similar child-friendly educational coding platform, you won’t just teach them the basics of coding but help improve their overall communication skills too.

3. Practices better descriptiveness

Coding isn’t just something that a person does on a machine. It is often a collaborative process or something you share with and explain to others. This usually includes describing and explaining to others what your code does and how it does it, why you made it that way, and so on.

This, in turn, teaches you to better communicate even the most complex and technical concepts to others.

4. Enhances writing skills

Coding may be done in special programming languages, but those languages still use the same Latin script as English. What’s more, many coding terms or syntax principles tend to have their roots in English.

As such, coding regularly improves not just your typing speed, but your overall familiarity and comfort with all basic writing principles.

5. Expands the vocabulary

Because coding languages are comprised of many terms that stem from real language words, learning to code has the added benefit of also expanding one’s vocabulary.

Even coding terms that aren’t just variations of real words have that effect, as their etymology, i.e., how they came to be, still tends to teach us additional things about words from English and other real-world languages.

6. Deepens the understanding of syntax and grammar principles

Grammar is famously the trickiest part of learning English (or any other language, really) for kids.

While every language has different grammar rules, however, the basic principles behind these grammar and syntax rules always have the same purpose: to make the language more orderly, consistent, and understandable.

So, learning a programming language and its own grammar and syntax tends to help kids understand how these principles work, why they are important, and why they are slightly different in every language, including English.  

7. Improves computer and digital literacy

This point and the one right after aren’t directly linked to English language skills, but have a major effect on many aspects of a child’s development, and that includes language skills.

In this case, as learning to code drastically improves people’s computer literacy and digital literacy, which then helps them have a much easier time navigating the digital world and utilizing its endless resources.

And, with most of the internet being in English, this has a major effect on how far people can expand their English vocabulary and language skills.

8. Helps develop logical and analytical thinking

Probably the most important side effect of learning coding as a skill is how drastically that improves your critical thinking, analytical processes, logical reasoning, error-spotting skills, your creativity, your compartmentalizing abilities, and many other cognitive skills.

All of those are very important for the overall development and future educational achievements of kids in any discipline, and that includes English and all language proficiencies.

As you can see, even though coding requires the use of its own specialized languages, it is actually a great way to set kids up for an even easier time improving on their natural language skills. 

In fact, this goes beyond just helping with English skills, as learning the basics of coding makes it easier to learn and improve any other language, too, simply because the skills you get from coding are transferable to language learning as a whole.

This is likely why multilingual people have an easier time learning to code, just as those who know how to code have an easier time learning new languages.

• https://www.edutopia.org/video/support-language-learning-using-coding
• https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-english-for-developers-a2/
• https://medium.com/@matt_74101/cracking-the-code-to-learn-real-english-5ddbe4ce5045