Cross-cultural Analysis of Bilinguals Most of the people who I know in the United States are bilingual, and I think that is a result of the diverse, and multicultural nature of the American society. So, it is quite easy to choose someone, and interview him/her for a cross-cultural analysis. I chose Amandine because she has the most inspiring, and eye-opening experience of all of my bilingual friends. After interviewing her, I knew that we shared similar and different linguistic experiences. Amandine currently lives in the States, and she is a freelance theatre actress and private tutor who teaches French classes. She grew up in the French countryside, and speaks English, French fluently. Also, she is an advanced learner of Spanish, and Russian.
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Despite the cultural and linguistic differences, our process of learning English is fairly similar. On the matter of bilingualism, we have similar and different language performance. Amandine speaks French as her first language, and English as her academic language. I can describe her as a balanced bilingual who uses two languages in a multiplicity of domains (2011, p. 3-8). Her academically-related language competence was highly developed during her education in the parochial school because the school curricula was only in English. Although she learned the language when she was in the fourth grade, her conversational competence was at a low level since she did not use English in the street. Baker describes such competence as a surface fluency (2011, p. 12). In spite of this, she was able to gain language proficiency using complex contexts such as the Bible and other great English literary works of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth. Regarding my language performance, my experience was absolutely the opposite because I used English in extremely limited contexts, in an additive bilingual situation (2011, p. 71). As a matter of fact, I practiced the language solely in academic settings. Unlike Amandine, I got introduced to Engish at a relatively late age. My first
Despite the cultural and linguistic differences, our process of learning English is fairly similar. On the matter of bilingualism, we have similar and different language performance. Amandine speaks French as her first language, and English as her academic language. I can describe her as a balanced bilingual who uses two languages in a multiplicity of domains (2011, p. 3-8). Her academically-related language competence was highly developed during her education in the parochial school because the school curricula was only in English. Although she learned the language when she was in the fourth grade, her conversational competence was at a low level since she did not use English in the street. Baker describes such competence as a surface fluency (2011, p. 12). In spite of this, she was able to gain language proficiency using complex contexts such as the Bible and other great English literary works of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth. Regarding my language performance, my experience was absolutely the opposite because I used English in extremely limited contexts, in an additive bilingual situation (2011, p. 71). As a matter of fact, I practiced the language solely in academic settings. Unlike Amandine, I got introduced to Engish at a relatively late age. My first