Tag Archives: ISA

Benefits of Bilingualism

My program directors at ISA posted this link on their facebook page this afternoon about the benefits of being bilingual. I’ll let you all read the article for yourselves, but basically it says that people that are bilingual can handle switching attention to different topics with ease, staying focused and holding information in your mind.

I’m not posting this article because I think that I have become bilingual… in my head I think that to be truly bilingual you need to have learned a second language from birth, or be put in a living environment for a very long period of time with the second language. If I lived in Spain another five years, I’d probably get there. 

I’ve recently started volunteering at a bilingual school in Salamanca. Every Wednesday I walk to the private school, about ten minutes away, and transform into Lily, the linguist assistant. Most of you know I want to eventually be an elementary school teacher, so when this opportunity came up I was so excited! I get to work with kids and also give back to my current community- two things that I do and love doing at home! 

What I come away with week after week at the school is how awesome I think the idea of bilingual schools are! I mean, I teach 6 year olds who can already speak better English than their teachers who are Spanish with English as a second language. And, these kids start to learn French at age 10. It’s so easy to learn another language at a young age, and as this article shows, it really helps out the old noggin too!! I hope to send my kids to a bilingual school someday, and wish they were more common in the USA.

The more I meet people from Europe the more I am jealous of their language skills. I’d say that on average of the folks I meet here from Europe know 3 languages perfectly. So awesome. Don’t get me wrong, I love the USA and have come to appreciate many things about the states that I didn’t before, but I really hope that we can start implementing more language requirements into school systems.

There’s my two cents! I hope you all feel inspired to go buy Rosetta Stone and put your children in private French lessons after reading this. Just kidding!! 🙂 But I do hope this opens up your eyes to the importance and usefulness of being bilingual. If anything else, it’s awesome to know a second language and you can brag about it to friends, right?!

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