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Loading...The Advantages of Being Bilingual
A recent New York Times op-ed offered compelling arguments for the benefits of bilingualism. Knowing more than one language is an asset for navigating a global world: English may have become a lingua franca, but so much gets lost in the translation from one language to another that it can only help “when in Rome (or Beijing or Mexico City) to speak as the Romans (or Chinese or Mexicans) do.”
Bilingualism Enhances Cognitive Functioning
Recent studies have shown that bilingualism improves cognitive skills and can even be a defense against dementia in old age. The New York Times op-ed‘s Yudhijit Bhattacharjee cites research that suggests that being bilingual gives a person a “heightened ability to monitor the environment”:
“Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.
These and other benefits are often cited in efforts across the US to create dual-language-immersion programs.
Efforts To Create Two-way Language Programs
California students can earn a “state seal of biliteracy” on their high school transcripts and diplomas; this signifies that they have attained fluency in English and a second language. In 2011, 6,000 graduating California seniors received such a seal.
In two-way immersion programs, native speakers of English and native speakers of a second language learn both languages in the same classroom, with the goal of students being fully bilingual, biliterate students by the end of elementary school. 14-year-old Amber Sevilla has been attending the two-way language program at Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco and is fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin. Up until middle school, most of her classes, including math, were in Chinese; she now takes health education and college and career education in Chinese. She says that the program is “hard work, but … worth it.”
For a program to be considered a two-way one, at least one-third of the students must be native speakers of the second language. As Laurie Olsen, a national expert on English-learners who designed the two-way language instructional model in use at San Jose’s Gardner Academy, emphasizes, educators need to “make sure that programs do not “become dominated by middle- and upper-income students whose parents want them to learn a second language.”
Dual-language programs have been shown to aid in closing the achievement gap between English learners and those fluent in English.
Read more: alzheimers, bilingual education, BILINGUALISM, brain, chinese, communication, education, foreign language, french, language, multitasking, neurology, spanish
Photo by hsivonen
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may
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Thanks for sharing this with us Kevin.
Regardless if you believe some deserve the death penalty ....the reality is that it doesn't happen for…
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26 comments
+ add your ownyay! im bilingual (and a half?)
About time we do learn another language.
ty
Great I can spesk 3 :)
i'm predominantly mono-lingual
i wish i were multilingual like many members of my family
I know many languages and get mixed up in my head sometimes, but it's worth it :) No one can talk in your back without you knowing haha.
ty
Of course this is true, and only hysterical biases prevent more Americans from admitting it.
knowing 2 language rocks =)
I wish I were bilingual. The more people you can communicate with the better, also the more friendships you can cultivate, concepts lost on the xenophobic nationalists in this country (and here on Care2).
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