Euroasia: Language, Culture and Travel

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 realised that one sure-fire way of generating traffic to one’s blog is to talk about relationships. Cross-cultural relationships is certainly a hot topic. In fact some random Russian blog picked up my previous post and translated my points into Russian. Pity I can’t read Russian, but using Google translator, I figured this was the case.

Still on the topic of building cross-cultural relationships, some people are of the opinion that social groups that are prejudiced towards each other only need mix together in order to reduce this prejudice. I hear this all the time. And this logic drives a lot of official initiatives to promote opportunities for different cultural groups to mix together.

It would be great if it were that simple, but unfortunately contact is not enough.

It is necessary that both groups have equal status, have personal interaction, engage in cooperative activities to achieve collective goals, and it should be considered the norm for the groups to interact.

Source: Aronson, E., Blaney, N., Stephan, C., Sikes, J., & Snapp, M. (1978). The jigsaw classroom. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

This winter, you can witness the power of the collective vision by simply visiting a local sports bar on a night when the All Blacks plays Australia. When the All Blacks wins the game everyone is congratulating and hugging one another. I’ve witnessed this scene numerous times at different places.

It’s one of those rare occasions where no one cares what your colour, creed or race is.  All that matters is that you’re wearing black.