You get smarter by becoming bilingual
Two Cornell linguistic researchers are saying that teaching children how to speak a second language is great mind food for the kids. According to studies at the Cornell Language Acquisition Lab (CLAL), children who learn a second language can maintain attention despite outside stimuli better than children who know only one language.
Barbara Lust, a developmental psychology and linguistics expert, professor of human development and director of CLAL, says: “Cognitive advantages follow from becoming bilingual.” “These cognitive advantages can contribute to a child’s future academic success.”
Lust has been exploring language acquisition in young children for more than 30 years, across more than 20 different languages and cultures, studying which aspects of language acquisition are biologically endowed and which are learned, when and how language acquisition begins and how multiple language acquisition affects cognitive development in children.
“One of the greatest feats of human development is learning language,” says Lust. It’s remarkable, she says, “how well equipped children are, beginning at birth, to accomplish the complex task of learning language.”
Pretty amazing stuff. So if your kids are not already learning a second language, you should consider asking them to do so. If their schools are not already offering language lessons, you should also be asking their school principals why not.
Even adults benefit from learning a foreign language, with real advantages beyond dressing up a CV. What better example for your kids than having a go at it yourself? That way French or Japanese won’t be the only subject you can’t help your child with. Should you decide to take up some language lessons, you know you can contact the language learning experts at Euroasia.
Next intake in June and July 2009.
I think one of the crucial aspect is to decide which foreign language to learn. This depends on the purpose of the learning. If the priority is to communicate with a larger group of people, learn Chinese, English, French, Russian or Arabic might be helpful.
P4KOCs Great topic, nice message. Thank you.,
This is true. I am trilingual (English, Spanish, French) and my biggest regret in life/in my parents is that they did not raise me to be bilingual from a young age. It took me about 4 years to become proficient in Spanish (7th grade to high school sophomore) and due to my Spanish, I became nearly as fluent in French in only 6 months. Native multilinguism is of course comparable to being born into a caste system/nobility, because some people just happen to have an environment which allows them to be multilingual and society awards them for something which has nothing to do with ability/merit (it’s like giving money to a person just because they were born with green eyes, etc.). If you have any young children, you can get them to be natively multilingual in as many languages as you wish, so long as they are properly exposed to the desired language and keep it up with practice.