Dear parents and/or
teachers:
I have done some
research for you, in order to find which are, from my point of view, the most
suitable definitions of bilingual and trilingual education. You can read here a
short definition of both:
BILINGUAL EDUCATION:
Bilingual education involves teaching academic content in two languages, in a
native and secondary language with varying amounts of each language used in
accordance with the program model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilingual_education
BILINGUALISM AT HOME:
This is not a definition, but it is a clear example, of which in my opinion,
should be proper bilingualism at home:
One Person, One
Language (OPOL) is the most common family language system in use. For instance,
Kees speaks his native Dutch, while his wife speaks English. Each parent or
caregiver consistently speaks only one language to the child. Sometimes OPOL
requires extra "language supplements," such as playgroups, visits
from family, a trip to the country, or a native speaking nanny or au-pair. It
helps tremendously for your child to hear that his parent isn't the only one
who speaks this language. Kids are savvy little creatures who are quite capable
of reasoning that they don't really need to know a language if it is only spoken
by one other person.
http://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/bilingualkids4.htm
TRILINGUALISM:
Trilingualism is
generally treated in the relevant literature as another type of bilingualism,
and theories and findings from studies of bilinguals are often assumed to be
applicable to trilinguals by extension. Trilingualism is frequently explained
briefly as a special phenomenon of bilingualism, using special cases of
brain-damaged trilinguals who recover all three languages, or of young children
who are precociously trilingual. There are many types of trilinguals: children
growing up in a trilingual environment, adults living in a trilingual or
multilingual community, and fluent bilinguals who have learned a third language
at school or for other reasons. Most of these types do not have much choice of
whether they wish to be trilingual; it is simply a fact of their particular
circumstances. How they deal with three languages is interesting in that the
three languages (or cultures) cannot be 'balanced' or equal, as they can be in
a bilingual person.
https://zif.spz.tu-darmstadt.de/jg-05-1/beitrag/barron.htm
BENEFITS OF BILINGUAL
EDUCATION:
"The New York
Times: "WHY BILINGUALS ARE SMARTER":
Almost 20 percent of
India’s population, some 240 million people, is multilingual, and millions are
trilingual. (Sri Lanka, meanwhile, has proclaimed 2012 the “Year for a
Trilingual Sri Lanka.”)
10 Awesome Benefits Of
Being Trilingual
A study performed in
2004 found out that those who speak more than two languageshave higher
cognitive thinking abilities.
SPEAKING two languages
rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly
globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the
advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to
converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you
smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive
skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.
This view of
bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism
through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long
considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that
hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.
They were not wrong
about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain
both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus
creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this
interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a
blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving
the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.
Bilinguals, for
instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of
mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and
Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort
blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital
bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle.
In the first task, the
children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin
marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red
circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were
asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing
the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were
quicker at performing this task.
The collective evidence
from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves
the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the
attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing
various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring
distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to
another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of
directions while driving.
Why does the tussle
between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of
cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed
primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of
suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help
train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that
explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown
that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not
require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of
numbers scattered randomly on a page.
The key difference
between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to
monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you
may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another
language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in
Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we
monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian
bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his
colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but
they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in
monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.
The bilingual
experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is
reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language
later in life).
In a 2009 study led by
Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste,
Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared
with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants
were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a
screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in
anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began
appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual
environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new
direction while the other babies did not.
Bilingualism’s effects
also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly
Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar
Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with
a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of
proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of
dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of
bilingualism, the later the age of onset.
Nobody ever doubted the
power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the
sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint?
WIKIPEDIA: COGNITIVE ADVANCES OF BILINGUALISM:
Being bilingual has
been linked to a number of cognitive benefits. Research has studied how a
bilingual individual's L1 first language (L1) and second language (L2)
interact, and has shown that both languages have an influence on the function of
one another, and possibly on cognitive function outside of language. Some
research on linguistic development, perception, and attentional and inhibitory
control has suggested that bilinguals can benefit from significant cognitive
advantages over monolingual peers in various settings.
However, there is some
disagreement over how these findings should be interpreted. A systematic review
of studies carried out between 1999 and 2012 found that the evidence for
cognitive advantages is mixed and that reporting may be subject to publication
bias which has given a distorted view of the evidence.[1]
During the history of
research into the cognitive advantages of bilingualism, the view shifted from a
subtractive to an additive perspective;[2] that is from believing that being
bilingual detracts from one's abilities to believing that being bilingual adds
to an individual's abilities.
A bilingual can be
defined as an individual that is exposed to two languages simultaneously from a
young age (under 3),[3]Template:Date=Sept 2015 although the definition may vary
slightly depending on the studies being presented and their sample selection
processes. Several definitions have been given in the literature for
bilingualism, for example, either individuals that are learners of another
language irrespective of proficiency, or individuals that are equally
proficient in both languages.
ARTICLES ABOUT THE
BENEFITS OF TRILINGUALISM:
Again, "The New
York Times:
If Bilingual Is Good,
Is Trilingual Better?
“Being bilingual, it
turns out, makes you smarter,” Yudhijit Bhattacharjee writes in an op-ed in The
New York Times. “It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving
cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in
old age.”
But if being bilingual
is good, what about being trilingual, as so many people in India are? Or even
quadrilingual?
That’s hardly unusual
in India, where someone may, speak, say, Punjabi and Hindi with their father’s
family, Bengali with their mother’s and Hindi and English with their spouse and
children.India’s 2001 census lists 122 languages, and bi- or trilingualism is
so assumed that the census questionnaires ask respondents for their first,
second and third languages.
But research into the
effect of trilingualism is scarce, in India or worldwide.
“Trilingualism is
generally treated in the relevant literature as another type of bilingualism,
and theories and findings from studies of bilinguals are often assumed to be
applicable to trilinguals by extension,” Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert, a researcher
on languageswrote in 2000. A study Ms. Barron-Hauwaert conducted on trilingual
children, mostly in Europe, found that three languages can’t be balanced as
easily as two, and that a child’s age plays a big part on what language it would
speak. She found “very young children using the mother’s language as their
first language while 3- to 4-year olds use the father’s language; the older
children prefer the local language.”
In India, research on
the dozens of languages spoken in the country often has an economic focus,
rather than any focus on the effect on individual intelligence.
Analysis of Indian
multilingualism during the 19th and 20th centuries looked at it as a “problem”
to be overcome, according to aresearch paper published on the Evaluations and
Language Resources Distribution Agency Website. “But, in the present 21st
century, because of the systematic language policy initiatives of the past half
a century, we have begun to look at multilingualism as an asset.”
In a 2008 study focused
on India, an economics professor said “language learning and linguistic
diversity ought to be taken as endogenous to the process of economic
development.”
Donaldo Julian
Banuelos-Uribe in Ideas on Oct 27, 2015
Being trilingual means
having the ability for a person to speak three languages fluently. For many, it
seems like a daunting process to reach the goal of having such high command in
three languages. It definitely isn't easy, that is for sure. But like my very
own mother once told me, everything that requires hard work and sacrifice gives
the best most rewarding results.
Sure, it is difficult
to gain fluency in three languages, but the time and sacrifice in the long run
is worth it. That's why I am here to tell you the benefits of speaking three
languages.
1.You become a
different person with every language you master.
The beauty of acquiring
a new language is the new soul that comes with it. Every language has different
idioms, different color terms, etc., which makes you appreciate the beauty much
more. For example, Russian has two terms for blue; there is a way of saying
"light blue" and "dark blue" with totally different words.
Learning Russian would lead you to think more deeply about the world and what composes
it. French is famous for its romantic phrases, and learning French will help
you acquire a romantic soul. Not to mention, you also begin to understand
cultural references. Virtually, you become so full of culture!
2. Multilingualism
could open opportunities for jobs.
When individuals put
down more than one language in the language section of an application, they
become much more employable since they can communicate with so many more
customers who do not speak English.
3. You find a
connection in history, art, literature, but most importantly, your heritage.
Speaking the language
of your heritage connects you to your family members who might not possibly
speak English. My ability to speak Spanish fluently allows me to dig deeper
into my heritage; it gives me a sense of national pride.
Not everything is in
English! Learning a new language will come in handy when you read literature in
a different language, or when you study art history.
4. You become smarter!
Seriously!
5. It'll decrease your
chances of dementia!
It is already known
that reading decreases your chances of getting dementia in old age, but the
same goes for knowing more than one language! A study was conducted in 2012 by
UC San Diego that found that, of the 44 elderly participants who could speak
both Spanish and English, those with higher levels of proficiency in both
languages were less likely to develop dementia or Alzheimer's.
6. You will appreciate
cultures much more.
If you plan on
traveling, learning another might be very useful. You travel to experience
other climates, cultures, etc. but if you know the language of the culture, you
will find much more beauty in it.
7. You'll boost your
memory!
You'll give your brain
a workout trying to remember all the grammar rules and vocabulary.
8. You'll probably be
much more attractive to some people.
I mean, who does not
want somebody who has the ability to communicate in three languages?
9. You'll learn to
appreciate phrases that are lost in translation.
10. You'll be able to
interact and connect with other people around the globe easily.
Traveling to France?
Know French? Who knows! You could possibly find your soulmate at a lovely
Parisian café, if you know a little French!
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