DIVERSITY FOR HOUSING

Equality & diversity for Housing

Equality & diversity for Housing

Introduction

Bangladeshis is the UKs fastest growing communities and immigrant groups. The population of Bangladeshis has increased as a rapid rate over the years. According to the UK census in 2001, there are 154,363 Bangladeshi people residing in UK. Furthermore, there are more than 284, 065 residents of Bangladeshi ethnicity. In this essay, we would be discussing the promotion of bilingualism for Bangladeshi community's public health in UK. In UK, 95% of the population speaks only English. There are hundreds of thousands of speakers of other languages. These are mainly languages of Asian origin, but European languages and Caribbean languages are also widely spoken.

Provision of bilingualism service

Bangladeshi communities can learn useful lessons from the experience of teaching bilingualism in Wales. There are six officially recognized minority languages in the UK, and of these Welsh have the greatest number of speakers at around 600 000. A project growth' in Welsh and an acronym for 'taking Welsh to families has been developed in Wales over the past 10 years to advise, encourage and support parents to introduce Welsh, as well as English to their babies. Its work and messages can be useful to health visitors across the UK.Children who are fluent in two languages have many advantages (Bowlby, 1995). Speaking two languages helps the child to communicate with a wider range of people and better understand two cultures, and it can help bridge between generations within a family. Being bilingual also confers some distinct cognitive advantages, such as a greater ability to solve scientific problems (Johnson, Molloy, 1995).

Ways of providing information

The community workers provide health visitors, midwives and other partners in their areas with resources from the bilingual project and information about relevant research, and they regularly visit antenatal and postnatal clinics to talk to parents. Where a need is identified, the bilingual project worker runs groups for new parents and parents-to-be to help those to speak Welsh to their baby through activities such as baby massage, singing and stories.Health visitors provide parents with information in order to make an informed choice about many health-related matters. Equally, parents need to know that it is advantageous for their child to speak more than one language in order to decide which language or languages to speak at home. Children who only have a limited exposure to one of their languages demonstrate cognitive and reading advantages. However, if a child has a low level of competence in both of their languages, then there may be some detrimental cognitive effects.

In Wales, the bilingual program has produced a short illustrated leaflet called eight good reasons to help the health professional to inform parents of the advantages of bilingualism. In addition, the all-Wales handheld maternity notes are held within a purpose-designed folder that has the bilingual program information and message on the cover, along with contact information for the project website and helpline. Community workers visit antenatal and postnatal clinics in order to talk to parents also to inform ...