Bilingual In The Classroom

After taking two years of Spanish in high school I feel like the reason for not being able to use the language today is because of the time period given. I can't imagine anyone being able to learn another language in two academic years. My teacher in high school was using the repetitive technique as his teaching method but we would focus only on that one particular topic for a few weeks and move on from it, for example the alphabet. In our book it says, "A variety of techniques are important because of limited language capacity "(As cited by Brown and Lee, 2015, p.142). My teacher should have added some different teaching methods into his lessons that would be more beneficial to the student’s retention of the information. I don’t remember ever …show more content…
We have much Spanish history and a great percentage of Texans speak Spanish, especially our cities close to the boarders such as San Antonio, Laredo, and more. Since we do have many Spanish speaking citizen’s jobs are looking for bilingual employers and most even get paid more for speaking two or more languages. After reading the article The Cognitive Benefits of Bring Bilingual by Veronica Marian and Anthony Shook I realized that being bilingual is more that making more money it actually makes your brain activity increase. “For instance, when bilingual people have to switch between naming pictures in Spanish and naming them in English, they show increased activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), a brain region associated with cognitive skills like attention and inhibition”(Marian and Shook). For people that are bilingual their brains are constantly being exercised between their known languages, which can allow the brain to strengthen and be able to processes words faster. Being able to process words faster means they can get more work done in a shorter amount of time, therefore making them a more beneficial