I don’t know the science, but I feel intuitively that there is a correlation between kids who are forced to speak too early and stuttering. Maybe messing with the neurology that produces speech too early is not a good idea.
When my level 1 kids, in April or so, start complaining about not being able to speak French, I tell them that I don’t expect them to be able to speak any more than I would expect a child of a few months old to start speaking. It’s just too early.
I tell them that the connections between the brain and all of the French that they have so far heard in class, all 120 hours of it, is a paltry sum compared to the required 2000 hours for natural speech to emerge (I make that number up and it changes but it makes the point that they are not ready).
I ask them if they would make an airplane without wings and then try to fly it. I explain to them that the wings must be there, that the plane can’t fly if it isn’t finished, and I make the comparison between that and how the listening must be there, thousands of hours of it, for their speech plane to be able to take off.
I keep comparing the issue to the five or six years necessary for a small child to start speaking properly. I tell them that if they want, they can try to speak now, but it will be all garbled, and that they just need so many more hours of listening for it to work.
There really isn’t much they can say to those arguments. The only people who have really openly and sometimes vehemently rejected the notion that speech is late emerging are language teachers. Bless their hearts.
I use these arguments against forced input on parents, too. There are so many parents walking around who, because they got A’s in those memorization classes of the past, think that they can speak the language they studied. They got A’s so they must be able to speak it, right? That’s just stupid.