bilingual education

I am a big believer in multilingual education for children. Do not not believe the experts that will tell you it will affect your child’s language development in a negative way. In is untrue. It will develop their brains and organizes their gray matter in ways a mono lingual person can never have.

• I wrote a page about bilingualism and bilingual education for your child.

It is worth reading. I posted it to the main part of my site as it is a rather long post and could be printed with greater ease.

Education and bilingual children

Transitional Bilingual Education – Typically a transition to bilingualism takes a child about three years. Even if the child falls behind a little in their mother tongue as long as you give both languages attention the child will get caught up. It happens when a child moves to another country or has parents speaking at home another language before the age of eight years old.

Dual Language Immersion Bilingual Education – This is what I recommend. My post above give you ideas to do this if you are or if you are not multilingual.

Late development education of a dual language – This happens when you start beyond the critical period of about eight years.  That is say at age thirteen your child moves to a Spanish speaking country and needs to learn the language or even if you simply start teaching your child latter in an immersion environment or simulated immersion. I think in the teens children can approximate native speaker sounds but often times do not become bilingual as defined by a PET scan of their brain.  That is they store the information in another part of the brain then a native speaker. This is why my theory is start kids young with a bilingual education and do not worry about them lagging in their first language.

I guess what I am looking for is more ideas on bilingual education.  If anyone has any ideas please comment.

I invite all ideas or experiences.  I would like to create a larger resource for bilingualism and bilingual education. Even if you are not an expert please comment.  The more the better.

My parents spoke Polish and Ukrainian. However, they did not teach these languages to me when I grew up. In the 1960s it was not in vogue to be anything than a WASP. I and my parents have often regretted the fact that I did not simply acquire these languages when I was a child, I would have been a native speaker in 3 languages and could have bridged this to other languages.

Years latter I learned Polish and my next language will be Ukrainian of course. Even though I do not speak Polish perfectly without an accent like a native, I speak Polish. Further I moved to Poland.

Now here is the advantage of learning a language instead of having it bestowed upon you as a child (my children I hope will be bilingual). When I moved to Poland I was special. I was a foreigner who spoke Polish. If I was a native people would treat me just like they treat any other guy on the street.
But now a complete American (I am very American), experienced what I would call the hollywood effect. Think of how women in the States or UK often go for some exotic guy with an accent. Accents can be sexy. And apparently in Polish I have one.

I was a star. I foreigner who did not simply assume the whole world spoke English. Of course it was hard to learn the language, but it was good for my brain.

What if you are already bilingual? No problem, learn a third or forth language.

The truth is all times and ages are good to start a child with a language. However, the question is do you want them to speak like a native or like a foreigner. I live in Krakow, and many parents say they will start their children young with learning English, like 8 years old. I think this is great. Bravo, as few American do this. I know I am an American, and although my parents were native Polish and Ukrainian speakers as well as English of course, they only taught me English, this is America.

When are the most important years for a child to learn? -5 months to 0 to 3 years old. I remember when I was 2 and 3 years old I was already conscious and I have clear conversational memories to this day. Children grow brain cells before they are born. Their brains are complete before they are born. At the age of 0 to 5 years they prune away brain cells not needed. But no new cell growth really occurs only connections. Therefore, teaching a child a new language at 8 is like teaching a person at 28 almost. So why not start when the child’s brain has no pruned away the brain cells and can still naturally differentiate sounds. I would rather give my kids a tutor speaking to them as babies then a Ivy league education. IQ is formed very early as are many talents and the first 8 years are very important to a babies cognitive development including language skills. I think from conception to age 8 at most, IQ is formed and from 8 to 18 emotional intelligence is formed. So if you want your children to speak a language as a native – start early. Many people are busy with their jobs, but my reply is what more important job in the world could there be than raising a child. And although being bilingual is not a must for a child, its a nice gift to give your children.

Using hand gestures to help you in expressing yourself was seen as a sign of weak verbal or language development.  A substitution for verbal fluency.  However, the work on Elena Nicoladis Department of Psychology University of Alberta indicates the contrary. Children who used more hand gestures and expressive body language had significantly stronger verbal and language skills than those who used less expressive body language. Children were asked to tell stories and those who used their hands illustrate or dramatizes their stories were more developed in terms of languages. Elena Nicholadis thinks there is a connection between language, memory and fluency of hand gestures.

Girls used more hand gestures than boys

Elena Nicholadis’ research showed girls used hand gestures more than boys when trying to express themselves, which corresponded with the notion that girls  have superior language abilities and faster development.

Techniques to learn a language, body language

If you want to learn a second language, use hand gestures, use body language. When you are at a sticking point with expressing yourself start gesturing, this will help to get the language out believes Nicholadis.  Nicholadis focused her research on bilingual children and although she is not studying learning a second languages directly, her idea of using body language to enhance verbal language is grounded in a very plausible idea.

I have been looking around at how much people get paid for being bilingual. If you are talking apples and apples, bilingualism will reward you with about a 15% increase per year in your pay. However, this is for basic job. The reward for a professionals, will be a higher, as one will have a specialty niche market that others can not focus on.  For the entrepreneur, you can count on saving of about 300%. 300%, if you can off shore your vital functions to an area that cost less than your backyard, even your support functions. Lets say you speak Ukrainian and have traveled to Ukraine and know the country and the people, there is no reason you can not do what you do with help from Ukrainian workers or even base yourself there. Therefore, bilingualism has many rewards, the least of which is financial. Most people I feel do not know how to leverage their bilingual skills. Further people born with the bilingualism often do not market their skills as effective as those who learned to be bilingual. The world pays on what you can do for me. So instead of putting the fact you are bilingual at the end of your CV, under additional skills, make a clear statement.  I am bilingual and I can help you reinvent your process by using my skill to do ‘this or that’ and that will transform your business in a concrete way.  With that attitude  your bilingual skill you will more than double your earnings, because no one wants just a worker, they want someone to transform their business.

What is the difference in learning method? Bilingual babies focus on learning as many words as possible, monolingual babies focus on the small details of the words they learn.

Bilingual babies develop a strategy that they will focus their cognitive energies on associating words with with concrete objects. Two words for each object. They spend less brain resources focusing on details of the sounds and differentiating the sounds of similar words. Monolingual babies focus more closely on constant sounds and phonetic differentiation of sounds.

The net result is Monolingual babies learn words in their one language at a faster rate, by a few months, they pass language learning milestones faster. However, if you account for the total words learn, bilingual babies are at least even to the monolingual babies.

Further, the bilingual babies’ strategy of not focusing on the details of consonants sounds, does not have a major impact on their overall language skill; therefore, the trade off is more than worth it.

Read more ‘Using Speech Sounds to Guide Word Learning: The Case of Bilingual Infants’ from Child Development by Werker, Byers-Heinlein and Fennell.

Babies learn from their parents not from TV

Babies learn from their parents not from TV.  In fact some accelerated DVD language learning for slows babies progress.  DVDs are good for children and great for adults but for babies, they respond really only to real live humans, in other words, their parents.  If they hear it from their parents it has meaning for the baby.  To learn a language it has to be meaningful.  If you want your baby to learn a language than speak to them.  I think a baby hears about a million words by six months years old.  Hearing these words the baby is able to organizes the language in their brain.  But to watch TV or radio there is no real context for them to organize it.

Put in that perspective, that a baby hears a million meaningful words and sentences, if you are an adult and want to learn a language, you have to listen over and over to something that is meaningful to you.  This is why I created language learning with music because you can listen to a song a thousand times until it sinks in. I also want to create learning languages with the Bible as this is meaningful to many people.  A baby listens to millions of words that are real and meaningful, so do not expect to study for ten minutes a day using some run of the mill program or book and be fluent in your target language.

The USA has given more funding and starting new programs in bilingual education in the public schools.  The objective is to make the USA more competitive in the global market.  These programs are just not traditional languages classes in a foreign language, but these are true bilingual education programs in public schools. For example, each class will have half the students fluent in Chinese and half the class fluent in English.  This fifty- fifty approach is going to be the reality for the `10,000 students who signed up for this in NYC alone.

Effect on students

So far the students who signed up are only showing enthusiasm for and excitement.  Where school was boring now it has become something new.

Arabic schools in NYC

One of the most controversial bilingual programs is Arabic in NYC public schools. Many oppose this. I do not. The reason, is we can not be bias against something or someone based on their race or culture as a whole.  The Arab culture is generally peaceful.  What happen with the terrorist attacks where done by people who turned against God. They betrayed their own culture and God.  God is the God of peace, love and forgiveness. They damaged the reputation of the billions of believers around the world, those who believe that God is the God of peace and love.  Sorry for all this but I think we should build bridges between cultures.  Look at the Germans and the French or the Poles, once sworn enemies are now cooperating and building the EU. Or the American north and south since the civil war.

Accent

If you want to sound like a native what will give you away,  grammar mistakes or accents?  Accents of course.   I hear people in the States make grammar mistakes all the time, even if they are native speakers, however, people who have perfect accents when learning a language, yet make grammar mistakes its often hard to tell.

Wrong grammar is accepted

Think about it in the States how many songs have wrong grammar.  People often do not even use an “s” in the their person. For example Timberland’s song “The way I are” or any other countless performers .  In fact many people in the south say, ‘Them are’ or do not use are pronoun cases right. Grammar misuse is ok, however, if your accent is strange people will right away know you are not a native speaker.

If you are bilingual, even better if you are bilingual from childhood, more and more research is supporting the theory that your bilingual abilities will delay or even prevent dementia.  The idea is that when you speak more than one language you need to have the ability to differentiate between two distinct sets of rules and words, and this engages latent part of the brain not found in non bilingual people. Your gray matter is denser and thicker.   Bilingualism has a particularly positive effect on the frontal lobe.  This region is almost by definition the area that is responsible for human intellect.