How Important is Bilingualism?
According to the Atlantic, only one percent of the adult population in America, whose native language is English, is proficient in a foreign language—in Europe, the average is 56 percent. This discrepancy is partly due to the globalization of English, which encourages non-native English speakers to learn English, while native English speakers do not have this same cultural influence to learn another language. However, that is no excuse for native English speakers. For the 2014-2015 school year, the high school graduation rate reached 83%, as surveyed by npr.org. 83% of students from that year attended schooling regularly for twelve years and graduated, meeting the requirements of a variety of standardized testing …show more content…
However, bilingualism has long-term affects on an individual that, if the second language is kept up, will affect the person through their life span. A group of researchers completed a very expansive research experiment titled “Does Bilingualism Influence Cognitive Aging?” This study is over sixty years long and with 853 participants and tis purpose is to understand the affects of bilingualism or multilingualism on an individual throughout their lifespan. They tested the monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual participants many times for memory, speed of information processing, reasoning abilities, vocabulary, reading, and verbal fluency. The experiment concluded that the more languages an individual knows the more ability that individual has in the categories listed above (Bak 962). The results of this analysis prove the long-lasting cognitive affects for those who are bilingual. The benefits as a result of bilingualism are immense from a cognitive perspective and are equally as helpful in a lifetime as that of any other subjects in schooling. Because bilingualism affects the way an individual thinks, it is crucial to cultivate this ability to have future generations with stronger cognitive functions that are on par with other countries who already have a bilingual culture. Consequently, the benefits, if started at an early enough age, can affect the student’s ability in other courses because the individual has more flexible cognitive functions; the student will be more receptive in thinking in different terms, such as algebra or chemistry. Later in life, the ability to learn new systems and think in different ways will be a highly sought after trait when the students enter the job market and need to adapt quickly to their work environments. Because of the crossover of benefits, it is important to understand the breadth and depth