Raise a child bilingual brings cognitive benefits

   When you hear about raising a bilingual child, is normal to think about all the difficulties that can appear in the process, but more than that, it is better to start thinking about all the benefits that this method can bring to your child’s life. Diverse studies support the idea that bilingualism is not a distraction or something that implies any disturbance in the mother tongue’s learning process. Moreover, raise a children bilingual brings many cognitive benefits. For example, bilingual brains have better attention and task and also better switching capacities than the monolingual ones. In addition, bilingualism is associated to strong proficiency and high verbal working memory. Also, learn a second language is very helpful for children. It helps them to improve in overall school performance, cognitive development, problem solving and creativity.

   According to Marian and Shook (2012), “bilingual brains have better attention and task and also better switching capacities than the monolingual ones”. In addition, the results demolish the thoughts that raising a child bilingual could bring more difficulties in learning than benefits. But actually, researches indicate that people that know two languages are better in tasks that required conflict management. Also Peal and Lambert’s researches in the early 60’s have shown us that bilingual children performed better than the monolingual ones in many examinations and surveys. That marked a precedent and a new perspective about how bilingualism had been seen in the past. So raising a child bilingual is completely recommend nowadays because of the improvements in language, concentration, cognitive development and tasks. Moreover, bilingual children have shown better proficiency in organization and categorization of work.

   Secondly, according to Marian, V., & Spivey, M. (2003). “bilingualism is associated to strong proficiency and high verbal working memory” when a bilingualism child speaks, his or her brain works in two languages, this is because when the child is speaking and pronouns a word, the brain activate “codes” to search and co-activate familiar word in both languages, native and foreign, for example if the child says “activity” his or her brain will find words like “act, active, activation, actively, and so on…” On the other hand if the child´s native language is Spanish, the brain will find immediately the word “actividad” This phenomenon opens the possibility that the bilingual child have an extended and varied vocabulary in comparison to a monolingual child.

   Bilingualism helps them to improve in overall school performance, cognitive development, problem solving and creativity. With the “stroop task” which is a quick test where the participant have to mention the color of a written word no matter if the word named a different color, for example if the word “red” is colored in yellow, the participant must mention the color yellow which is the color shown in the word, bilingual people do not have problems with this test because they name the color and not the word, this is because bilingual people acquire an ability called “inhibitory control” what means that bilingualism provide the ability to ignore the irrelevant information and focus on the relevant input. (Prior, A., & MacWhinney, B. (2010). A bilingual advantage in task switching. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13(2), 253–262) this helps the child in other activities in his or her school performance provide them with better concentration and focusing them in what is really relevant.

   To conclude, we can say that are numerous and significant the benefits that bilingualism can bring into a child life, not only in her or his speaking skills, but also in their concentration, school performance and problem solving skills. In addition to this, bring up a bilingual child is a challenge but not an impossible goal, and even more interesting if you are an English teacher.

.Applied Linguistics Cmap.

    With this C-map, you can form your own definition of Applied Linguistics. As teachers, we know it is extremely important that students must create their own definitions about concepts from the lesson with familiar words taken from their own vocabulary, and a concept map is a good tool to fulfill this strategy. In this opportunity, with my classmate Paola Merino, we structured this concept map as well as possible, with the main key words of our notes in this course. The importance of the “concept map” to me, is the possibility to create a good visual artefact to those visual skilled students, for example, when you plan the presentation stage of a new topic in your lesson, you must be careful and up to your student´s skills, for this reason you need to apply different strategies, in this case, the concept map is a good source for those visual students because it presents all the key words and specific connectors and if you want to make a concept map even more visual, you can use images and colors related with the words that you need to use in the C-map.

   When this topic was covered in class, about theories of language acquisition, most of my classmates thought out loud that behaviourism was the most old and out dated theory to acquire knowledge. In my personal opinion, you cannot let behind a theory like behaviourism to teach, what I mean is that, as teachers, sometimes we need to apply behaviourism in some lessons to teach for example pronunciation or grammar. In the same way, topics, units or lessons must be covered in a suitable way for your learners and if you know well your learner´s needs and skills, as teacher you will know how to teach them better.

"Communicative Language Teaching: A Conversation Between Jeremy Harmer and Scott Thornbury"

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The Communicative Approach.

  Here is a power point presentation made by my classmates Franco Rubiera, Claudio Contreras and me. We explained in class the main goals of the Communicative Approach.

     To this presentation, we added a role play where I was the teacher and my class was Franco and Claudio. The lesson activity was a game called “who is the best liar” The participants had to make three sentences about personal information, two of them TRUE and one FALSE, at the time of share the information the other members of the class have to guess what of the sentences is the “lie”.

    With this role play we tried to exemplify that, in this approach is more important the act of communication than the content or the topic of the conversation. When learners are involve in real conversations their language learning acquisition are all active and the use of the language is encourage by the motivation of the speakers to communicate their ideas, thoughts or feelings.

   The teacher’s role, as the images of the presentation says, “teachers will find themselves talking less and listening more” in this approach teachers are facilitator or guides in the conversation, giving instructions, making questions or shearing “clues” to follow the conversation.

   Students are the active ones here, that means, students are encourage to use the language no matter if they make mistakes, or if they forget words or even grammar. The importance here is the communication between students, to receive unconscious feedback in the moment of speak.

   Mistakes are view as a part of the learning process, so every mistake is view as a positive experience. Teachers are recommended to keep those mistakes in mind to correct them at the end of the class or to check them in a reinforce class.

   One of the most relevant advantages of this approach, in my personal opinion, is that all the skills can be involve in just one lesson; speaking, listening, writing and reading. As teacher you can plan your lesson with the communicative approach and “squeeze” your student’s English language knowledge as much as possible, engaging them with a hooking topic according with their level and personal likes and dislikes, what makes the English language easy to learn in terms that students learn easily when they have the disposition. Other advantage of this approach is the autonomous work among students, as a group or pairs, letting them being responsible of their knowledge, creating an unconscious chain of feedback among them, correcting themselves pronunciation, fluency and grammar. As far as we can see, the communication approach has numerous advantages for teachers and obviously to the students pushing their skills to the top to fulfill the AIM of the lesson.