1. Bilingualism In Our Society

1. BILINGUALISM IN OUR SOCIETY

First of all, we must explain what bilingualism means: for some people, it means the ability to communicate in two different languages equally; and for others, it isthe ability to use two languages but in a diferent level, with greater skills in one of them.

Throught time, bilingualism has used to be considered a potential social problem due to the followingreasons:
- Language as one’s one identity: cultural, religious...
- Linguistic minorities vs. Standard majorities: the minorities are usually looked down upon by the majority.
-Discrimination (immigration waves).
- Hostility to other cultures
However, there is evidence of countries where different languages and cultures live in harmony, such as Switzerland. When the attitudesof minorities and majorities are friendly, bilingualism doesn’t have negative consequences for a group.

From the psycholinguistic point of view, bilingualism was a problem due to issues such as:- How can a person store, produce and develope two languages in a single storage?
- How does a bilingual individual think?
- Are the cognitive process betwwen bilingual and monolingualthe same?
To answer these kind of questions, psychologist have used experimental methods and made laboratory studies about comprehension and production of language; and the results have shown thatprocess speed increases both of them according to the experience the subject has with a language.

In order to solve other problems, many researches with bilingual children were made. Those researchesfocused on:
- How language develops: developmental sequence, interference between languages, code switching...
- Space and time concepts
And the techniques used were:
- Case StudyMethod: based on observation
- Imitation Technique

Besides, there are different theories which try to explain the best way to teach a child how to use two languages. But most researches agree...