Blog Post #4

For my fourth blog post, I decided to go more in depth into the benefits of children who grow up in the culture of bilingualism. The article I read was rather short, but it was packed with many valuable facts and sources. It is called, “The Benefits of Being Bilingual,” and although it does not list a single author, it seems to be a great tool for a believer in bilingualism. The article is written from the opinions of the Head Start program, and their programs belief’s about bilingualism staying active between the children’s homes and schools. Because Head Start is a preschool program that serves very low-income families in the United States, this population also includes many diverse families. The Head Start program is so diverse, in fact, that according to the article, “Head Start currently serves more than 300,000 children who ar dual language learners (DLLs) in 87.4 percent of its classrooms (Office of Head Start, 2011). The article places the benefits of bilingualism into four major categories: cognitive, social-emotional, learning, and global benefits.

In each category, there were benefits that I had before never considered. To just give a few examples, some of the cognitive benefits of bilingualism were that research shows that their brains are more flexible than those who are not bilingual. Also, they tend to be stronger in focusing, remembering, and making decisions. In the social-emotional category, research shows that bilingual children tend to have stronger ties within their entire family, culture and in some cases community. The learning category somewhat ties in with cognitive, but what stood out to me was that children who are bilingual develop a more flexible approaches to thinking through problems. Also, because of their ability to read and think in two different languages, they tend to have higher levels of abstract thoughts. Finally, as for global benefits, bilingual individuals have the opportunity to participate in the global community in many more ways.

The section of Affirming Diversity that this article almost directly relates to is under “Linguistic Diversity and Learning.” The section states that “In contrast to negative perceptions of bilingualism, a good deal of research confirms the positive influence of knowing more than one language, and these benefits begin very early in life,” (226). The passage goes on to tell more examples and studies of children who grew up in a bilingual setting. Both of the book and this article work well hand-in-hand to demonstrate the benefits of teachers and parents supporting bilingualism within children’s education.