This 27th collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-
Discuss the following statement:
“The only language difficulties experienced by most bilingual children arise simply because they are living in a mainly monolingual society.”
From Baker, C. (2006). Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (4th ed.).
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, p. 347.
In reality, I find that some people can speak two or more than two languages for their daily interaction and they don’t even go to a language school. If they are bilingual and go to a good language school, still they have language difficulties.
There are difficulties because there is no language speaking environment around them.
Monolinguals can also experience difficulties, so both monolinguals and bilinguals need to learn or research more on the language change and uses.
I don’t agree, because there is no evidence to show that bilingual effects on monolingual or monolingual effects on bilingual.
I disagree. The lecture notes say that bilingualism has nothing to do with intelligence.
The difficulty may be in school, as the children learn only grammar rules about a new language. When bilingual children want to use the rules to apply to the real society, they don’t have the chance because of the monolingual society where they live.
I agree with the statement, because sometimes the children use mix language without thinking about syntax. For example, many authors explain the term of mixing language or we can call that codeswitches.
There are difficulties in bilingual societies too, like language variations, diolects, accents and so on. That child still faces the same problems with language difficulties.
Bilingual children are children who study second language to be able to communicate in two or more than two languages. It is difficult to improve with their bilingual ability if they don’t exposure to the monolingual environment.
There can be language interference from the surroundings. For example, they can say “I angry you” instead of the correct “I am angry you”. All they can do is speak with their second language teacher at school.
Only rich children are able to be bilingual because their parents are affordable to send them to study in Internal School to acquire the language natural with foreign teachers.
A mainly monolinguist people cannot adopt their brain by switching from their only mother toung language to an extremely new language. A bilingualist already has the idea for their new language, how to compare and arrange. Monolinguists learn only one language from their birth, so they have no chance to re-alive in order to become a binguist from doing that.
It is difficult arising bilingual children in monolingual societies. As the children grow up, they need to access with the thing around them.
The more you expose, the easier it will become.
More to come...