Positive Effects of Bilingualism on Children

Positive Effects of Bilingualism on Children

Introduction

It has been established that learning a second language poses significant positive impacts on the intellectual development and growth of children. It enhances and enriches the mental development of a child; it provides increased flexibility to the students for thinking, better ear for listening, and increased sensitivity to language. Apart from this, bilingualism also enhances the understanding of a child regarding their native language. On the contrary, it provides the children with the capability of communicating with different individuals they would otherwise not have the chance to interact with. It paves ways to different cultures and assists children in understanding as well as appreciating individuals from different nations and also provides the students with a head start in the requirements related to language for later years of schooling. The cognitive factor plays a crucial role in the success and speed of learning the language.

Also, various other factors, like motivation and conversational factors determining the type and size of exposure to the second language are also critically significant to the process of language acquisition as well as interaction with the cognitive factors. The procedure of acquiring second language may be elucidated by discriminating amid the two aspects of proficiency; the input-based and the attribute-based. The personality and cognitive variables are good examples of attributes which positively impact proficiency in learning a second language. The input based dimension of proficiency is associated to the quality and quality of secondary language input that is gained from the environment. The differences are not necessarily visible in the initial years, however with the passage of time the impacts of every dimension would turn to be increasingly visible in a person. There must be a line of discrimination amid de- contextualized, academic language and contextualized, conversational language for the order of understanding the nature of literacy and language development in the children. Some examples of such discriminations include discriminations between composition, conversation, text and utterance, and analytic and communicative competence (Bialystok & Feng, 2010).

Thesis Statement

The purpose of this research is to explore and analyze the evidence related to the education, linguistic proficiency, and cognitive development in bilingual children.

Discussion

What food is to human fitness; bilingualism is to intelligence. Ongoing discussions have been conducted regarding the bilingual children and their mental capabilities related to education and intelligence. It is believed by the experts that a bilingual child could not grow up as an intellectual for the fact that they have expertise in two languages. However the consent has significantly changes over the last thirty years or so, with the use and development of novel testing. A child having bilingual capability imparts a prospect for the researchers to analyze and investigate regarding the associations between thought and language (Bialystok & Craik, 2010). A bilingual child has added advantage in education because of their mental flexibility, divergent thought, and cognitive development. Cognitive capability is related to the mental activities, like using, learning, remembering or thinking language. It is demonstrated in the ...