Bilingualism : A Culturally And Culturally Diverse Country Essay

Bilingual are those who use two or more languages in life. Some people are able to talk fluently in two different languages like able to speak, read, and understand two languages equally well is called bilingual. Knowledge of a second language given to the a person to talk with a wider range of people. Therefore, speak to languages lead to be more intelligent. There are many positive effects and negative effects from being bilingual.

First off, it’s important to understand the difference between learning and education. Learning is the ability of an individual’s brain to acquire and retain information for a lifetime, whereas education is an aide to further strengthen a student’s learning capacity with the use of resources: teachers, libraries, classroom environment, etc. All students are essentially equal when they enter the educational environment, however students who don’t speak English have an unfair disadvantage in the american educational system.

As the previous discussion has shown, the notions bilingualism and bilingual education are pretty complex. Summing up, bilingualism exists in different levels, which are defined as termed individual bilingualism and societal bilingualism. These forms are typical either for the whole language minorities (communities) or for an individual. This should be taken into account for bilingual education, which can be described as language possession at the individual level. From the research that has been carried out, it is possible to conclude that this issue is very complex and can be described by various dimensions, such as language ability, achievement, competences, performance, proficiency and skills, as well as the age of language acquisition, the balance of two languages, context of language usage.

In my opinion bilingualism plays a major role in the educational development of children. This is because research has shown that children who are fluent in their home language are more successful in learning a second language. Furthermore, being bilingual offers greater sensitivity to language, more flexibility in thinking and better ear for listening. It also improves a child’s understanding for the native language. Moreover, knowledge of other languages increases a career of opportunities offering several job options.

The issue of bilingual education is a very controversial issue and many people have different views concerning this subject. "Bilingual education began in 1968 as a small, $7.5 million federal program to help Mexican-American students, half of whom could not speak English well when they entered first grade" (Chavez 23). In addition, it began 23 years ago as a historic order for busing students to schools to achieve racial integration. One would believe that the supporters of bilingual education are Latino's but in actuality they are black and white professionals who know the advantages of their children being bilingual. It has been proven that students who are enrolled in

To become bilingual, must you lose a piece of your identity? Or can the cultures of language coexist in a person? In the essays by Martin Espada and Richard Rodriguez, the ability to maintain identity as a bilingual speaker is challenged. According to Espada, Spanish should be permitted everywhere to prevent losing a piece of one’s identity. However, Rodriguez believes that a piece of your identity must be sacrificed in order to be accepted into a new culture. For others, such as myself, there is a happy compromise; bilingualism should be encouraged and supported in public to communicate and spread understanding.

Bilingualism and multilingualism are well practiced through the World. Despite it being well accepted on other parts of the globe, many areas in the United States tends to turn a cold shoulder to it.. Most education policies concerning bilingual or not based on scientific evidence and research (which has discovered the advantages and disadvantages of bilingualism) but rather pre conceived notions and stigmas when it comes to the practice. After some brief research, I believe we should embrace the "new wave" practices and policies, which are more well informed rather than the past. Researches also need to explore new ways in which the brain retains, recognizes and organizes language learning. Now is the tome to put evidence based practices and

The linguistic and cultural clashes that children encounter, and how they negotiate between their ethnic and American “mainstream” cultures, and how these clashes and problems influence their relationship with their parents and their ethnic identities as a whole and how they were dealt with differently as we look at two stories dealing with two girls who are both coming of age in different society from where they originally came from. Jairy’s Jargon a story written by Carmen-Gloria Ballista, is a story that encounters the life of a young girl coming of age in Puerto Rico, except she’s originally from New York. Milly Cepeda’s story, Mari y Lissy, is a story about twin sisters who differ in personality and are often at odds with each

Due to the rise in bilingual programs in the U.S., researchers began to wonder how a child’s brain was able to process two languages simultaneously. To their utter amazement, students who were bilingual benefit in multiple areas of their lives. For example, they have greater cognitive flexibility, superior language skills, and a higher IQ. Nevertheless, some parents, teachers, and even some researchers were concerned that immersing students in the target language, with no instruction in the first language, may cause students to lose their ability to converse/use their first language. In other words, fear began to rise that teaching in only the desired second language may cause the students to favor that language over their native language. This is where the research controversies

Many people do not believe in bilingual education because they think that the student would confuse the two languages and in the end speak neither one correctly. A closer look at when the two language mixes reveals that most of them master one of the languages to the same degree as a monolingual speaker (Korth 3). Through their bilingualism, they can use linguistic means creatively in accordance with the demands of the situation. This flexibility is a cognitive ability, which monolingual speakers can achieve only through effortful learning and training. Switching from one language to the other can be interpreted as an indication of the speaker’s fluency (Korth 3). In some cases, the languages are only spoken in specific places. If a child speaks

According to them, bilingual children suffer on average from delays in terms of vocabulary and are disadvantaged in the language understanding and acquisitions (“The Latest”). It seems there is nothing special about bilinguals (“The Latest”). They have better cognitive abilities because language is something that we use all the time, and doing it with more than one is harder. It engages the brain in multitasking (“The Latest”).

On June 4, 1998 Proposition 227 was passed by California voters, denying bilingual education to the majority of Spanish-speaking children in California (Ballotpedia n.d.). On November 8, 2016 Proposition 58 was passed, repealing much of these bilingual education restrictions (Ballotpedia n.d.). Taken together, these propositions emphasized two sides of the bilingual debate—on one side, those focused on the monolingual, nationalistic tendencies of “one nation, one language;” on the other side, those focused on multilingualism as important in indexing identity. Unintended social and linguistic effects resulted from these propositions, placing the bilingual education system deeper within the political framework of California’s language

This site contains information on 8,000 children across different ages and different levels of cognitive abilities. Three groups of kids with varying parental backgrounds were tested on their cognitive abilities. The three groups were children with two UK parents, two foreign born parents, and one foreign/one UK parent. According to Clifton-Sprigg, it has been established that early education in language influences the child’s ability to learn new skills. This poses the question whether being bilingual will be an advantage or disadvantage to the child. In this case linguists have shared opposing views on whether the child benefits from being bilingualism. Some linguists argue that bilingualism can give a distinct advantage because it improves the understanding of some concepts and improves creative ability. Other linguists offer a different perspective saying that children who are monolingual spend less time learning the language which allows them to pick up other skills easier. An observation done was that a child's linguistic ability is dependent on the parents and how suited they are to teach the child language. Problems become apparent

Growing up as a successive/sequential bilingual, and my hands-on experience as an ESL teacher, bilingualism has been always in my area of interest. After coming to the USA in October 2015, I had the chance to work with BAWDI (Bangladesh American Women Development Initiative), a Paterson-based organization where I met bilinguals of different age groups coming from the diverse socio-economic background. The variation in their L1 and L2 language proficiency made me more interested in this area. My interactions with them helped me to gather some fascinating data about bilingual phenomenon i.e. attitudes of parents towards bilingualism, what factors contribute to subtractive and additive bilingualism, how age affects language variation and so

Bilingual students have the ability to think cognitively in both their first language and their second language. What they lack is the spoken or written language in