Why It's Smart to Be Bilingual

On a sweltering August morning, in a classroom overlooking New York's Hudson River, a group of 3-year-olds are rolling sticky rice balls in chocolate sprinkles, as a teacher guides them completely in Mandarin.

This is just one toddler learning game at the total--immersion language summer camp run by the primary school Bilingual Buds, which offers a year-round curriculum in Mandarin as well as Spanish (at a New Jersey campus) for kids as young as 2.

Bilingualism, of course, can be a leg up for college admission and a r�sum� burnisher. But a growing body of research now offers a further rationale: the regular, high-level use of more than one language may actually improve early brain development.

According to several different studies, command of two or more languages bolsters the ability to focus in the face of distraction, decide between competing alternatives, and disregard irrelevant information. These essential skills are grouped together, known in brain terms as "executive function." The research suggests they develop ahead of time in bilingual children, and are already evident in kids as young as 3 or 4.

While no one has yet identified the exact mechanism by which bilingualism boosts brain development, the advantage likely stems from the bilingual's need to continually select the right language for a given situation. According to Ellen Bialystok, a professor at York University in Toronto and a leading researcher in the field, this constant selecting process is strenuous exercise for the brain and involves processes beyond those required for monolingual speech, resulting in an extra stash of mental acuity, or, in Bialy-stok's terms, a "cognitive reserve."

I don't know how representative my case it, but here it is. When my daughter was born, I only spoke Spanish to her. She was slow starting to speak, but we assumed it was reasonable given the fact that she was hearing twice the number of words (everybody else around her spoke English) and that she needed time to kind of "sort them out". By age 4 she was perfectly bilingual, the only difference between her and a Spanish kid was that she would never use the conjunctive tense in a sentence, so sometimes what she said did not sound quite right although the meaning was obvious to everybody. Then, at the age of 6, her Spanish grandmother died and she reacted terribly to the news. She screamed that she hated anything that was Spanish or having to do with Spain. That day she stopped speaking Spanish, she would throw a tantrum whenever I spoke to her in that language, and cried that she couldn't understand. To make a long story short, somehow she "forgot" all her Spanish, she had to work really hard in high school (teachers and students alike assumed she did speak the language, so she felt pushed to get straight As). Regardless, I think it is a great idea to bring up a bilingual child, that it will carry many advantages for him/her.

The article says "command of two or more languages bolsters the ability to focus in the face of distraction, decide between competing alternatives, and disregard irrelevant information". I have never seen anybody read several articles and, without pause, write a detailed summary of all, like my daughter does. She has amazed her English teachers/professors. So, I would say, growing up bilingual was good for her!

If I was governor of Ohio I would require all grade schools to start teaching one foreign language to EVERYONE. I would provide the funds by cutting crap off the rest of the budget. The selection of the foreign language would be up to the local school community. Hopefully they wouldn’t all choose Spanish, and I would have the state search for German, Japanese and Mandarin teachers. High Schools would continue the language studies for those students who wished to continue.

The second language would give my Ohio students a huge advantage in the business and technical world. At the same time I would work to get the fed out of my state’s education business.

The only trouble I have run into is that the second language should be. A friend from Spain has to correct his daughter’s teacher, a Mexican-American, on the teachers very poor (admitted by the teacher) use of the language. I had Chinese neighbors who hate the PRC controlled Mandarin. I know Indians who hate that their kids can speak Hindi but their writing skills are poor. I hear business folks around me complain that many of the bilinguals are poor in both of their languages.

Sort of sounds like my 5 year old daughter. Her mother mostly has spoken to her in Spanish, and since she was 2 or 3, she could go seamlessly back and forth between Spanish and English (I would say something to her in English and she would go tell her mother in Spanish, or vice versa.)

I find it amazing that one traumatic experience could cause you daughter to "forget" all her Spanish. Kind of sad to hear that.

I've got a cousin who married a Spaniard (they met in Geneva, and he's now a US citizen), and they had 2 children, a boy and a girl. They raised them to be bilingual. At first, the husband would only speak Spanish to them, while my cousin would only speak English to them. As they were growing up, they would only speak English to their mom, and Spanish to their dad, even if he spoke in English, they'd still answer in Spanish! Eventually they figured out to speak the language spoken to them, but I always thought it was hilarious.

As to whether it helps with brain development, it certainly didn't hurt them any. Both kids took SATs (a year apart) and both got perfect scores. She graduated from Penn and went on to Georgetown for political science. He graduated from Stanford and is in med school now (I believe at UCLA).

I wish I was as smart as these kids.

Mark

Why NOT teach a child more than one language? Why would MORE knowledge be a bad thing?
I see it simply- the rest of the world( especially our enemies) teaches their children English. So THEY understand US, but the vast majority of Americans cannot understand THEM.
I, for one, would like to know what the Muslims in this country are saying in Arabic.
I grew up hearing French from grandparents-then studied it.
I’m teaching myself Japanese and Chinese. The first because I like the language, the second because I have a sweet Chinese neighbor lady I’d like to talk to in more than baby-English.
We purchased the ‘For Dummies’ books in Spanish and Chinese for my 10 year old niece. They even come with CD’s for pronunciation. It’s harder to learn another language the older you are. Yes- teach American children other languages!

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