Creating Bilingual Minds
Welcome back, incredible BookDuck fans. Knowing one or two foreign languages is a must nowadays. It’s an advantage that helps us reach our goals and take our dream job one day. Moreover, it enables us to communicate with more people of different cultures. In her TedxTalk, Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramirez speaks about how the brains of bilingual babies develop in comparison to monolingual babies.
So, the first question is why are we not all bilinguals? At school, we learn grammar rules, do our homework, and maybe even get high grades. And we think our second language is quite good. What happens when we converse with native speakers? Sometimes we just can't follow their conversations or comprehend most of the words and expressions. Learning a foreign language is difficult. It requires an overwhelming amount of time and effort.
Here comes the second question. Is it really necessary to be that difficult? She doesn’t think so. One doesn't have to struggle to reach equal fluency in two languages. Creating a bilingual mind is not an impossible task. First, we need to study those who excel at it. Babies! They learn their native tongues on their own, without being taught. And if they listen to a second language on a daily basis, they become bilingual without a single effort.
Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramirez is a professor at the University of Washington. Here she studies the brain processing of language in infants and young children. In one of their studies, they tested the differences of babies from monolingual and bilingual families where parents were native speakers of Spanish and English. So, during these studies babies who were all exactly 11 months old and not speaking yet listened to the sounds of both languages.
The results showed that monolingual babies’ brains were adapted to process the sounds of English, their native language, but not to comprehend the sounds of Spanish, which was unknown to them. Meanwhile, bilingual babies’ brains were adapted to process the sounds of both languages. This indicates that the baby's brain specializes in processing whichever language exists in the environment.
Then she talks about the prefrontal cortex. It is the part of the brain that is in charge of directing our attention and thinking flexibly. The research also revealed that multilingual babies exhibited higher brain activity and reactions to language sounds, particularly in these prefrontal areas.
With so many benefits, why aren't we raising all babies to be bilingual? The reason is people have various misconceptions concerning this.
First, they think bilingualism slows down the learning process. There is no scientific proof of this. Instead, bilingual babies know the same amounts of words, if not more, than monolingual babies.
Second, they fear that bilingualism creates confusion. So, next, she touches on a general phenomenon of bilingualism- code-switching. This happens when someone combines two languages during one sentence or an entire conversation. But does it make confusion? She claims that it is not merely a random combination of words from several languages. It adheres to grammatical rules. So, bilingual children are not confused. They know how to use code-switching to match the situation.
As we see, the human brain is capable of learning two languages as well as one at birth. So, beginning at a young age may be the best way to be a fluent speaker of two languages without struggling.
She ends her talk by speaking about the necessity of creating special environments in public education where all babies can learn foreign languages from an early age. Not so many children grow up in a family where parents speak two or more languages. Some parents believe their child may acquire a foreign language by watching television. Regrettably, no. Although older children may learn some foreign language terms through electronic media, babies learn languages through play and regular social contact with human beings.
She says that their team has created a science-based approach that should be applied in educational programs of public early education centers. They began testing this concept in one of the European capitals, and the results are promising. They hope this approach will be a new start for effective bilingual education.
To sum up, Dr. Naja Ferjan Ramirez talks about the advantages of creating a bilingual mind from an early age. It can help children reach their full potential with less effort.
