The Benefits of Bilingualism
Being bilingual means being able to use two languages effectively in four skills such as reading, writing, speaking and listening. Because of the demanding of English language in almost every aspect of life since English language is one of the global languages, there are a lot of people who are willing to learn English as a second language to improve their life. However, learning second language is not limited to English only, but also there are different languages that can be learned as second language. For example, Mandarina, Arabic, Spanish and Hindi are at the top of the most five spoken languages in the world (Summary by language size, n.d.). Since bilingualism is one of the worldwide phenomena, there are so many advantages of being bilingual. …show more content…
For instance, the Stroop task from Washington University was an experiment where the bilingual and monolingual students had to name the color they saw which was visually written in non-matching color (“5 Cognitive Benefits of Bilingualism”, 2015). For example, the word “Blue“ presented in “Red” color, so students should name the color instead of the word. This experiment indicated that comparing with monolingual students, bilingual students were able to ignore the distractions better (“5 Cognitive Benefits of Bilingualism”, 2015). Another example is a study on Northwestern University about controlling one of the language and inhibit the another to choose the correct language to perform the task. They used fMRI to bilingual and monolingual volunteers to monitor the oxygen flow to the brain in specific regions. Because the more oxygen is flowing in the brain, the harder working is doing that part (“Bilingual brains better equipped to process information”, 2014). One of the process at this task is to ask the volunteers to select the correct picture between four pictures according to the word “cloud “, and there is a “ crown “
Being bilingual means being able to use two languages effectively in four skills such as reading, writing, speaking and listening. Because of the demanding of English language in almost every aspect of life since English language is one of the global languages, there are a lot of people who are willing to learn English as a second language to improve their life. However, learning second language is not limited to English only, but also there are different languages that can be learned as second language. For example, Mandarina, Arabic, Spanish and Hindi are at the top of the most five spoken languages in the world (Summary by language size, n.d.). Since bilingualism is one of the worldwide phenomena, there are so many advantages of being bilingual. …show more content…
For instance, the Stroop task from Washington University was an experiment where the bilingual and monolingual students had to name the color they saw which was visually written in non-matching color (“5 Cognitive Benefits of Bilingualism”, 2015). For example, the word “Blue“ presented in “Red” color, so students should name the color instead of the word. This experiment indicated that comparing with monolingual students, bilingual students were able to ignore the distractions better (“5 Cognitive Benefits of Bilingualism”, 2015). Another example is a study on Northwestern University about controlling one of the language and inhibit the another to choose the correct language to perform the task. They used fMRI to bilingual and monolingual volunteers to monitor the oxygen flow to the brain in specific regions. Because the more oxygen is flowing in the brain, the harder working is doing that part (“Bilingual brains better equipped to process information”, 2014). One of the process at this task is to ask the volunteers to select the correct picture between four pictures according to the word “cloud “, and there is a “ crown “