Multilingualism

Introduction The purpose of this study is to learn how and to what extent bilingualism in early childhood (from ages 0-5) affects cognitive intelligence later in a person’s life as reflected by the academic performance at the university level. This an important and relevant topic for human development and education as schools are becoming increasingly more diverse, and there are more students from different cultural backgrounds speaking a multitude of languages. Many of these students will…

There are many societal stereotypes often associated with special education and bilingual education. For example, in special education some people tend to think that the students are crazy and hard to understand therefore they don't want to associate with them. They also think that students with disabilities are special and look different and because of this they should be treated differently than the rest. I believe that they shouldn't think like this of a child in special education because…

The fact that Americans are only limited to learning English as the common language directly affects my personal life as well as my professional future due to my native tongue being Spanish. My mother was the one who originally taught me English, as well as my grandfather who was a U.S. Marine and would always speak English to all of my family. My mother was an English teacher so that facilitated my learning experience as well as fixing accent and grammatical errors. Coming to America I…

Learning a second language (L2), after a first has already been acquired, may be a different process from learning a first language (L1); it involves acquisition of a new set of arbitrary forms to re-represent an already established set of forms from L1 (Midgley, Holcomb, & Grainger, 2009). Semantic and translation priming studies utilizing vocabulary from two languages offer an informative perspective into these processing systems of second language in the mind of a bilingual or a second…

It has been recently reported that 22% of children less than 5 years of age living in the United States are Hispanic (Facts for Features, 2008). While Spanish is currently a minority-language, the growing Hispanic population indicates that this may change in the years to come. With that in mind, schools across the nation should consider hiring more speech language pathologists (SLPs) and/or providing further bilingual assessment training for their current SLPs. Especially in densely populated…

Until the age of five, I was only exposed to the Spanish language, but when I started school, I quickly learned how to read, write, and speak English. When my mother gave birth to my younger brother, doctors advised us, as a bilingual household, to teach him one language at a time to avoid confusion. It would be interesting to examine this advice with a deeper understanding of language and its manifestation in our brains. Introduction: Language in the Brain The understanding of language has…

Rebuttal 1 - My opponent argues that Proposition 227 improved standardized test scores when it passed. Even if it was, which many studies disagree over, it is not beneficial anymore. It is outdated. Proposition 227 was passed 18 years ago – before the iPhone existed, before we had our first Black president, before we created laws against smoking. Our world has changed in ways that would have been unfathomable in 1998. And so have our education systems. Studies have been conducted, tests have…

The Importance of English Proficiency Among Immigrants Hindrance in communication alone highlights the importance for immigrants to learn the dominant language in any country they move to, more specifically, the necessity of learning English in the United States. The Importance of English Proficiency Among Immigrants Among the various challenges and expectations that immigrants are faced with when moving to a new country, the importance of second language acquisition supersedes the…

Imagine a world where everyone had a common language they could speak to each other with. Imagine a word where hate crimes could be easily avoided by simply speaking the same language. Imagine conflicts that could have been avoided if we had similar ways of looking at the world. While dying languages are a good source of history, we should not save dying languages they build a barrier between us and would eventually be a waste of time. The foremost function of languages is to communicate ideas.…

Two of the most impactful social ills that Americans face today, in one of the most progressive and technologically advanced nations on earth, is poverty and crime. Many would argue that they are akin. Is there a link and what can be done to diminish or eliminate it? The connection between poverty, crime and illiteracy has been well documented. Holzman-Escareno writes in a 2008 article, American prisoners have a much higher illiteracy rate, than our nation as a whole. Of the adult inmate…