...was widely believed that bilingualism was associated with lower cognitive function (Hakuta et al., 1987). Some researchers believed that bilingual children suffer from linguistic, intellectual and academic retardation in relation to their monolingual peers (Tucker & d’Anglejan,1971). Researchers have also shown the negative effects of bilingualism on cognitive abilities. Our brain is like the banking system in order to draw new information it had to eradicate old information such as first language to store second language (Freire 2000) so bilingualism is verbal disadvantage and bilingual perform poor in verbal-fluency tasks (Gollan & Brown, 2006, (Rosselli et al., 2000), bilinguals have disadvantages in speaking (Gollan et al) due...
Words: 2175 - Pages: 9
...To avoid any type of institutional barrier students and parents should count with the help of Spanish interpreters for parent-teacher conferences and under any academic and personal circumstances. Bilingual teachers from kindergarten through fifth grade (at least), should be available for the Hispanic parents, assisting them to learn the school system and strategies to help their kids to read at home and do their homework. Newsletters and all school information need to be sent home in both languages. School counselors also need to either be bilingual or work with interpreters, as well as social workers and the school psychologists. Speech pathologists should test students’ speech in English and Spanish. Furthermore, it is essential that parents get involved with the education of their children; the school system should do everything possible to avoid institutional disadvantages to minority groups and get this ethnic group of parents involved with the school and their students’ education. Parents need to learn the language, not only to help their kids, but to build a better future for them and their families. Getting...
Words: 2599 - Pages: 11
...I grew up in a household that where religion took a big role in our lives including my mom and I. Growing up, I was one of those church kids, that would attend every Sunday service with their mom, go during the week. Yup, I was that girl low key didn’t like it, some services were fun especially if it was arranged for my age group. In some way, the church makes you become homophobic, all I kept hearing from a young age is that being gay is sin, you don’t go to heaven and etc. The way some pastors would speak about the gay community, made you either fear gay people or simply judge them. When in reality we are no one to judge but God. In my previous semester, I took philosophy and it focused on world religions. It has opened my eyes in a different...
Words: 261 - Pages: 2
...Adversity is something everyone has to overcome at some point in their lifetime. As a young boy, I knew there was something about me different from the other kids. I realized that I was, in lamest terms, “gay”. I tried to keep it away from everyone. Although it was very hard to try and hide it from everyone, it was better than being ridiculed and made a fool in front of everyone. As my middle school years passed, I tried my hardest to fit in with the rest of my class. This was the most pivotal point in my life because the constant developments my body and my behaviors were going through made me question a lot about myself, but I always knew that I was interested in the same sex. So my seventh grade year I decided to embrace my sexuality and be the person I was meant to be. At first everyone took it as a surprise and constantly made fun of me calling me names and always the butt of the joke. This killed my self esteem for the longest time until one day I realized that I’m always going to have to fight and be a stronger person because of my sexual preference. I decided to build off of those things that people were saying to me and I became the bigger person. My classmates eventually saw this and started to respect me even more and became even curious about this “uncommon” trait in me. Therefore, I started to educate my fellow classmates and tell them my backstory and inspire them to be whoever they want to be. This raised a lot happiness and hope throughout my school. People...
Words: 564 - Pages: 3
...I never put a large thought, as to how race affected the way that I interact with other people and how other people interact with me until I made a list of things, regarding things that I do because of my race. Overall after writing many of things down, I found rather difficult to compile a list of things because I was mixing some of things that I do because of my ethnicity. For example, my family eats Pinto beans quiet often. However, I do not believe that has to do with being Hispanic, but rather with more of coming from my Mexican roots where most of my relatives eat Pinto beans Considering this setback, I was still able create a list of things I do solely because of my race. Some things like language were easier to accredit to race based...
Words: 294 - Pages: 2
...Raising a Truly Bilingual Child Children who speak more than one language are common in many parts of the world. However, raising your child to become truly bilingual can be quite a task here in the west. The constant bombardment of monolingual pop culture is one of the reasons for this. After all, when your child’s favorite cartoon shows are in English - what else can you expect? The good news is that kids are hardwired to learn new kinds of communication and there are things you can do to facilitate an ideal bilingual learning environment for your child. We’ll introduce some proven methods here that are widely popular around the world. Method #1 - Start With the Small Things What do kids generally look for? What are they easily drawn to...
Words: 739 - Pages: 3
...I was employed as a maintenance worker where I cleaned designated areas such as public washrooms or stadiums eight hours a day, six days a week, during the entirety of the CNE exhibition. This experience exposed me to an issue of employment inequality facing Toronto. Many of my co-workers were new immigrants, and they were taking multiple jobs for long hours in the low-paying service-sector. I was shocked to learn that many of them came with professional qualifications and high educational credentials from their homelands. Moreover, credential recognition is also a severe obstacle in the Chinese community. Many Chinese immigrants spend years in precarious labour before moving into secure employment. Not only does this damage the livelihood of Canadian residents, it also is detrimental to Canada as it wastes valuable human capital. It is essential that federal and provincial governments ameliorate foreign-credential recognition programs. This experience raised my awareness and changed my attitude on the barriers of being an immigrant, the hardships that my parents encountered, and privilege of receiving Canadian education. I have endeavoured to address this issue to my community and have become a strong advocate for secure employment to skilled immigrants with qualified credentials. I participated in a five-week French Immersion Program at Université de Saint-Boniface, Manitoba. I have excelled in French writing and reading throughout high school; however, French communication...
Words: 1145 - Pages: 5
...Imagine having to learn a language on the fly, now imagine having to learn that language and to play American football, which, in my opinion, is a overly complicated sport. The uttermost important factor in helping me withstand that sudden change was the fact that I had already been through something similar when I moved to Sweden and proceeded to stay there for two years before moving back to Brazil. But that was how my life went for my first six months in the United States, ultimately my will and determination to succeed helped me not just to survive through that year, but I believe it also matured me. Arriving in the US was simple, even though I had to say goodbye to my family and friends; The toughest parts were having to learn all those...
Words: 452 - Pages: 2
...I agree with the plan aimed at making all Puerto Rican children bilingual by 2022 because it could potentailly increase the student's chances at landing jobs and, Puerto Ricans can communucate more with english speaking people . As you read the my essay I will further explain how it is better to make children bilingual. First is that it could potentailly increase the student's chances at landing jobs because stated from the text " ...being bilingual could potentially increase students' chances of landing good jobs when they enter the marketplace. " Though some teachers may know the grammar the spoken language is still not their strong point. Puerto Rican are running behind many Europeans in second-language skills because " According to one...
Words: 286 - Pages: 2
...information back to us. Throughout the service we would have to ask the child questions to have him ask his dad. Even when it was time to pay the parent would hand the child the cash, some younger than ten, to then pay us whatever the amount was. If they were paying with a credit card the same thing would happen they would give it to their child and from there on the child was in control. In most household of English speaking, or bilingual families, they almost never would let their young children be in charge of their finances or other “adult” tasks like that. With native Spanish speaking children always being a part of their parent’s decisions, it makes them grow up faster and take life more seriously. As stated above these children do tend to do better in both languages and score higher in other aspects of life, compared to other children. As the native Spanish speaking community continues to grow, and the young group continues to practice both English and Spanish, eventually passing both onto their children the United States will become a nationally bilingual nation. If English and Spanish were both taught to everyone from a young age we could close the gap between the two communities and integrate our cultures together to become more understanding and tolerant of one another. ...
Words: 986 - Pages: 4
...Growing up Bilingual: A Spanish Heritage Speaker’s Views The role of bilingualism and multilingualism in a child’s growth and development is highly debated. On the one hand, there is a majority of people who grow up speaking multiple languages and dialects, while on the other hand, there are the minority who only grew up speaking one language. Through it all, there is a tension in the educational and societal ranks about whether or not there is an advantage to knowing a language beyond knowing what others are speaking. This is the story of a heritage speaker who grew up in a English-Spanish speaking household, and her views on this tension. Erin grew up in an English-Spanish speaking household, speaking in varying degrees of Spanish and English...
Words: 275 - Pages: 2
...Chicago’s School Having bilingual education in nursery school across Illinois is a valuable practice for children because it is important to acquire two languages with eloquence. Bilingualism is often related to immigration, and this element has developed particular views of approaches to bilingual education in the Chicagoland area. The most important is the distension of the young non-Native English speakers in the early learning. When the children are 3-5 years old going to preschool, Chicago public school places them into bilingual classes because they are identified as dual language learning. By using different theories from the sociological perspective, the set of interrelation of social and pedagogical purposes can be understand from the bilingual classes of preschool in Chicago. First, functionalist perspective emphasizes the interconnection between the different parts that are involved in bilingual education, and how they work together to produce a negative or positive influence. Second, the home culture as the standard focuses its viewpoint by criticizing the value of foreign culture by using the home culture inside the bilingual language and its benefits. Finally, conflict perspective focuses how society presents itself by using power and conflict over the resources and rules of the bilingual classes. Therefore, the sociology perspective can explain the increased demand concerning the bilingual movement. The request of the expansion of the bilingual programs in preschool...
Words: 3415 - Pages: 14
...Wonguk Cho SLS 380 Annotated Bibliography García, O. (2008). Bilingual education in the 21st century. (1st ed., Vol. 1, pp. 42-71). Chichest, England: Wiley-Blackwell. This chapter of the book deals with translanguaging, which is an approach to explain bilingualism where speakers switch from one language to another. The author thinks bilingualism is not the simple sum of a language and another language, but more complicated ability that is involved in a complex processing of human brain. Moreover, she saw code-switching as an actuality or evidence of procedure of bilingualism. At first, she refers to there are two types of code-switching; intrasentential and intersentential. Intrasentential occurs in boundaries of a clause or a sentence, so a speaker may add words or phrase of a language into a sentence in another language. On the other hand, intersentential occurs at clause or sentence boundaries. In this case, a narrator adds a whole sentence of a particular language during speaking in another language. In addition, he describes how to distinguish between code-switching and code-mixing. The main difference is whether or not the speaker knows how to differentiate between the two languages. If they do, it must be code-switching. This chapter describes how to approach to my recording data with theoretical background. Since it is hard to explain why and how code-switching is happening in the data, this chapter provides me a strong notion of code-switching, which will...
Words: 945 - Pages: 4
...critical analysis of the topic in the book “Academic Writing: Making the transition” by Steve Marshall. The book has a number of definitions for the term Bilingual. Edwards (1994), states that virtually all people were bilingual in nature. He stated that anyone who can communicate few words of another language is bilingual. This is to say that for example, if someone went on holiday to another country and could exchange a simple greeting in the foreign language, then he would be considered to be bilingual. The writer of the article states that the definition by Edwards is far from what most people consider to be bilingual because most people define bilingualism as the ability to fluently speak two languages. The problem with the Marshall’s statement is that he has not explained how he found out that most people define Bilingualism to be the ability to speak two languages fluently. He simply assumes this without giving conclusive evidence. It would have been better if he would have conducted a research or had the opinions of people on what they considered to be bilingual and would conclude based on the response by the people. Edwards’s definition is also ambiguous because the assumption that simply speaking a word of a foreign language makes one bilingual makes almost all people of the world bilingual because most people know few words of a foreign language and this would mean that everyone is bilingual. The definition by Bloomfield’s (1933) that being bilingual requires...
Words: 1430 - Pages: 6
...Bilingual Education By C. Mori When I started my investigation about bilingual education I never thought the debate about it would be as controversial and passionate as it is. But considering the numbers of English Language Learners (ELLs) in the U.S. public school, approximately 5.5 million, which represent about 11% of total number of students, and the percentage of drop outs, about 30% of ELLs, it is understandable that public opinion puts some pressure on the U.S. public school system to adopt the most efficient and adequate system for this growing minority group. The number of ELLs abandoning school has remained high for a long period of time generating serious doubts about the functionality and effectiveness of bilingual education and other programs. Two have been the main reasons attributed for this desertion from classes: the low socioeconomic level of ELLs and language differences. In this context, dual language, one modality of bilingual education, is showing to be able to make students excel in their academic performance and revert negative statistics Currently, in the United States there are two major approaches about how to teach English to those children whose primary language is different from English. The first approach is by immersing them in English only classes. This program was first implemented in California with proposition 227 in 1998 and continued to other states like Arizona and Massachusetts where bilingual education was...
Words: 2438 - Pages: 10
