Multilingual Essay

Theodore Roosevelt became the 26th President of the United States of America. Roosevelt, also known as Teddy or T.R., was the first president to win the Nobel Peace Prize as well as the only to win the Medal of Honor. Although few presidents were multilingual, remarkably, Roosevelt knew six languages and wrote thirty-six books. Modern-day presidents are known for being family oriented, oddly enough when Roosevelt moved to the White House it had been years since children resided there. I’m sure…

6500. 6500 is the number of languages spoken in the world today. New Zealand is becoming more and more multilingual with many different races living here. Take a look around the room, it’s obvious that we have many different races amongst us. Learning a second or a foreign language can help us communicate with the 6 billion people that are unable to speak english across the world. Learning a foreign language provides us with opportunities that we could not otherwise have by only speaking…

Letters, letters make up words, and words make up the languages spoken around the world. These languages define who we are or who we want to be. When we are born we are taught to learn to a specific language and as we get older we either learn new ones or learn more about the language we first know. I for one grew up around the Spanish language and later on I learned to speak English. Now that I am older I have chosen Spanish as my target language. Not many people know how to use this language…

Children are our pillars for tomorrow. It is therefore important to study children in different ages. The main goal of this project is to understand child development by using case study method along with child observations and parents interview. Given the circumstances of long distance, Skype is used to observe the child and parent interview. Matthew, who is born and raised in Hong Kong, is an outgoing and smart 7th grader. He is a 10 year-old Chinese boy growing up in a middle class family…

Should Students Learn a Foreign Language? The issue of whether it should be made mandatory for students to learn a foreign, or second language in school has been widely debated. A General Social Study carried out in 2006, stated, only 25% of American students speak a second language. Of this, only 43% claimed to speak the second language ' 'very well ' '. Furthermore, of these bilingual students, 89% learned it at home, with only 7% acquiring it at school. In contrast, to the 25% of American…

have suitable training can use the classroom-based assessments as tools that can help the students reach their full potential. As educators it is our responsibility to not only advocate for our “ traditional white American student” but for our multilingual/bilingual students, including the large group of Latinos, to have an equal and genuine opportunity to succeed academically and have access to higher education and the middle class America in the 21st century (Gonzalez,…

Media, television in particular, has been at the forefront of many children’s daily activities for years now. In our study book Invitation to The Life Span Berger (2010) states “One of today’s great challenges is the influence of electronic media” (p.220). The challenge this statement speaks on includes how long a child watches television and the type of program the child is viewing. Berger (2010) continues “The problem is not only that violent media teach aggression, but also that even…

Using a thorough ethnographic approach, Britta Schneider’s Salsa, language and transnationalism gives a deep insight into the language ideologies of three separate salsa dance communities of practice - one in Frankfurt, Germany, and two in Sydney, Australia. Besides adopting post-structuralist conceptual framework from prestigious scholars in the field of language and identity studies such as Blommaert, Pennycook, Bourdieu, as well as many others, Schneider also applies the method of rich…

Prabhu, N. S. 1987. Second Language Pedagogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3. Krashen, S. 1988. The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications. London: Longman. 4. Ellis, R. 1992. Second Language Acquisition and Language Pedagogy. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 5. Brandl, K (2008). Communicative Language Teaching in Action, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall. 6. Truscott, J. (1999). What’s wrong with oral grammar correction? Canadian Modem Language Review, 55,…

identities if we encouraged them to do so at first” (Graff 265). Furthermore, parents choose to educate their children on a second language so that that they can be more prepared for the future. The point is to encourage children to be bilingual or multilingual so they can have more ways to communicate in…