Bilingualism
... From then on, the language skills continue to rapidly increase. By first grade, the child will be able to understand around 8,000 words and use about 4,000. The child will have truly entered the world of language. According to Gleitman, “For the first three years, you can’t go wrong, unless you lock them in a dark closet.” It is important to start teaching a child a second language as soon as possible because a large portion of research indicates that a language encountered after the age of eight is likely to be spoken with a detectable “foreign accent.” Dr. Bialystok believes there are definite advantages to being bilingual when you are learning to read, providing that children are exposed to stories and literacy in both languages. Preschool children recognize letters in the alphabet long before they can actually read. Preschoolers who speak one language can usually recite the alphabet and spell their names but cannot read without help of pictures. But bilingual preschoolers can read sooner because they are able to recognize symbolic relations between letters/characters and sounds without having visual objects. Knowing a second language, according to the latest research on reading, can really help a child comprehend written langauages faster and possibly learn to read more easily. By age four, bilingual children have progressed more than monolingual children in understanding general properties of the symbolic function of written language. By five, they are more advanced than both monolinguals and bilinguals who have learned only one writing system in understanding specific representation properties, even in English. “Learning a foreign language at a very young age can clearly benefit children’s reading abilities and hopefully parents and educators can help to provide the resources for this to happen, said Dr. Bialystok. But, as there is to any controversial issue, this is the “other side” to consider. One argument that is made is that hearing two or more lanugages in childhood is a cause of a language disorder or language delay. It is claimed that hearing two or more languages will confuse the child and lead to grave problems in acquiring language. However, there is no scientific evidence to date that hearing two or more languages leads to delays or disorders in language acquisition. Many, many children throughout the world grow up with two or more languages from infancy without showing any signs of language delays or disorders. These children provide visible proof that there is no causal relationship between a bilingual environment and language learning problems. In fact, it has been shown in educational settings that building on a child’s skills in a first langauge helps the learning process of a second one (Romaine). Another argument is that children’s use of two languages within one sentence is a sign of confusion. Often, it is claimed that small children who are learning to speak two languages go through a stage of mixing and confusing the two. The use of words from both languages in a single sentence is cited as evidence that the child cannot distinguish between the two languages, but in reality, this is not a sign of confusion. In fact, it has been shown that the use of two languages in one sentence by mature bilinguals reveals a great deal of linguistic skill. It is also true that, while young bilingual children sometimes use words from two languages in the same sentence, they produce far more sentences using only one language in the same sentence. This clearly shows that they are able to keep their languages separate (Romaine, 1995). Language in the first ten years of life is such an important basis for the achievement of academ...