Bilinguismo/ Bilingualism

Second language acquisition

BILINGUALISM.

[Student number: 1116813.]


1116813
Anglia Ruskin University








INDEX




1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………….…………. Page 3




2. DEFINING BILINGUALISM……………………………………….…Page 5




3. INTERPRETING AGE EFFECTS……………………………………Page 6




4. BILINGUAL FAMILIES…………………………………....................Page 8




5. THEBILINGUAL CHILD……………………………………………...Page 6




6. COGNITIVE PROCESS IN BILINGUALS………………………..Page 13




7. BILINGUALISM IN SOCIETY AND CODE-SWITCHING.… Page 15




8. BILINGUALISM OR NOT?..........................................................Page 19




9. EDUCATIONAL ASPECTS OF BILINGUALISM………….……Page 20




10. CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………….Page 23




11.REFERENCES……………………………………………………………..Page 25







BILINGUALISM


1. INTRODUCTION.



Human have been in contact with different cultures over the history constantly. As consequent of colonialism or migrations many countries have a multilingual situation. In some places the present of two languages is used as an advantage but often the development of one of the language is more supportedthan the other. Questions such as nationalism or cultural conflict have stopped the view of a bilingual situation as an excellent environment to develop cognitive skill and linguistics.

Europe has multicultural situation in most of the countries and the value of the language is measured looking at the function and use of it. However, there is a new politic growing up, which have pretended to lookat every language and give space to use it and acquire it. Looking for example to places such as Spain where years ago the use of languages such as Catalan or Vasco where forbidden, nowadays in most of the schools in these communities the curriculum is taught in that languages.



Other factor that has a recent influence in developing bilingual situation is the globalization. Nowadays human isconstantly moving and the number of multicultural couples is dramatically rising.

For all this reasons it seen necessary to look at the issue of bilingualism and analysed, searching advisable approach of bilingual education.

Many important advantages have been found in multilingual contexts such as the range of linguistic resources. This essay will look more deeply to all factors aroundbilingualism and its development. Well as the change of mentality and attitudes

Nowadays a high number of researches about bilingualism have showed that the disadvantage that used to be seen were probably just myths or prejudges and could be induced for any other social reasons that we will look at later on. Over this work we will introduce all this issues deeply.

But it seems important, notonly define the context, many issues about bilingualism have to be looked in order to find the best ways to develop bilinguals skills. Hence in order to have a general view of bilingualism and be able to apply it to real situations. In this essay we are going to look at many aspects to clarify some of the most important points.

There will be a part to define fist what means bilingualism and inwhich different context we can find it, how important is the age factor, looking at different types of bilingualism and to the most classic views and the changing of concepts.

Once defined what is bilingualism we will be able to understand how cognitive systems works when we have two different languages systems, how we develop that skill, the way input are processed in a bilingual brain, lookingat the different stages to develop two languages when being a child. All this knowledge will help us to answer questions such as how we attach all the information in two different systems and many other wonderings. Using all this information to define the advantage and if is any, disadvantage of being bilingual. Last part will be about educational approaches.

One of my goal is to find the...