Seven years later, children who start learning English in the first grade achieve poorer results in this subject than children whose first English lesson isn’t until the third grade. This is according to the findings unearthed by the team headed by Dr Nils Jäkel and Prof Dr Markus Ritter at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. The researchers evaluated data gathered in a large longitudinal study in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, that was carried out between 2010 and 2014. The results have been published in the journal Language Learning.