Bilingualism: Benefits and Challenges

Bilingualism
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Introduction
• Bilingualism generally refers to the ability to understand and speak
two or more languages.
• Bilingualism has several benefits to an individual. Besides personal
development, bilingualism enhances skills like learning, critical and
creative thinking, problem solving and communication.
• Using two languages also helps one in learning different cultural
concepts which are passed from one generation to another through the
use of language (Bhatia,Ritchie & Wiley,2013).
• When compared with monolinguals using a test, the bilingual children
are found to have a lower intelligence quotient.

Literature review.
• A major area of interest in bilingualism is the first language acquisition
by children. It has been established that monolingual acquisition is
similar to bilingual first language acquisition in some aspects and
different in others.
• The similarities include the fact that in spite of the less exposure to each
language that a bilingual child gets when compared to the monolinguals,
both children reach several important milestones within the same age
span.
• Some of the important things they both achieve include canonical
bubbling, the overall rate of vocabulary growth and the first words.
Besides, the morpho-syntactic development for both children occur
within the same timeframe.

Literature review cont....
• The current research on bilingualism has also been shaped by three major
discoveries.
• The first one is that, for bilinguals, both languages are always active when
listening to a speech, when reading and when planning a speech in the two
languages.
• Although the bilinguals are usually not aware, this parallel activation means that
the unspoken language has a huge influence on the current language being used.
• There is always a cognitive competition between the two languages and the
bilingual therefore have to find a means of regulating the competition so as to
avoid the use of the unintended language to lose meaning or fluency of the first
language.
• Another discovery is that after the bilingual gains adequate proficiency in the
second language, this second language in turn comes to influence the first one.