Why Should We Teach Our Children Minority Languages?: 3

 

 

Parents need to be aware that: bringing up a bilingual child will affect the rest of their lives and the lives of their offspring.

Many people don’t realise that being bi -or monolingual – will ultimately affect several areas of their lives; including their identity, marriage, where they live, travel, ways of thinking, their employment and social networks.

 

Children who are bilingual enjoy:

* Wider communication with community/extended family/international links.

* Literacy into languages

* Two worlds of experience

* Greater tolerance of people and diversity

* Raised self-esteem

* Secure in the knowledge of ‘who they are.’

* Achievement at school is often greatly enhanced

* Bilingual children often find it much easier to learn a third language

* Their thinking is exposed to a greater variety of situations which often results in  

 greater creativity, heightened concentration and sensitivity in different situations.

* Future economic advantage

 

Young bilingual children, who have to choose between two languages several times a day; often develop a much better awareness of the languages involved in their day to day lives.

 

They are much better than monolingual children at establishing an abstract connection between letters and sounds. They often become better writers, are more able communicators and effective uses of language because of they have a better understanding of how language works.

 

Controlled experiments have been conducted and reveal that often bilingual children enjoy greater academic success. This is due to the fact that bilingual children need to have a constant awareness of language and their ability within it.

 

As we have seen; bilinguals often enjoy greater academic success.

Bilinguals have been shown to excel in DIVERGENT THINKING : this is basically the ability to come up with various solutions to a problem or situation rather than just one solution.

 

Being able to think DIVERGENTLY is considered to be a pre-requisite and a basic element of creativity. So for example children are often able to think of more than just one use for a paperclip, box etc there are many other tests that have been conducted that show bilingual children excelling in academia compared to their monolingual peers.

 

Therefore it doesn’t really matter which languages the child is bilingual in – it just matters that you, as a parent, attempt to facilitate your child’s learning into languages.

 

The beauty of second and third generation British Asians is that they have often had enough early exposure to the language in order to make a start or indeed use the wider community in their endeavours to transform their family into a bilingual home.

 

So leave your distaste or embarrassment for the mother tongue and embrace – for the sake of your child – a world of new possibilities!

 

 

 

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