Bilingualism In Spain Essay

In Spain, linguistically and culturally diverse children are thaught using an immersion methodology and with some special programs where they learn the official language of the country with the help of specialised teachers; so they do not learn in their mother tongue. Is this methodology the most apropiate one? As I see it, Spain provides an appropiate education for this students for many reasons: first of all, they are integrated in the rest of the class, so children are more open-minded with other cultures and religions; in addition, the learn a second language through social interacction, in real situations. Furthemore, this methodology has not any negative consequence in their mother tongue because according with the information found in the article of Navarro Romero, B., (2009) about Fleta’s (2006) contribution, children from age 5 have finished the adquisition process of L1, and compulsory education starts when children are 6. It’s true that this immersion could also have some “negative effects” because they grow up in other culture and they adopt some parts of it, rejecting some aspects of their parents and grandparents culture. It can seem that this fact undermines communication between different generations of the same family, but in my opinion families have to accept the life style their children choose when they have the decisional capacity, without paying attention if their descendants follow all the plans they have to them. According with Cummin’s (2001) view, our education system does not provide an appropiate education for culturally and linguistically diverse children because foreing pupils are not taught in their mother language and part of the citizens “advocate assimilation into the mainstream of society”. However, I absolutely reject the idea that these students have to eliminate their culture and assimilate the new one, because they can get both or decide which aspect of each culture they want to choose. For example nowadays in Spain there are people who think that we should not celebrate Halloween because we must celebrate the 1st of November remembering our death relatives. But I think that we don’t have to choose one thing or the other one, we can celebrate both or we can only celebrate the day we identify ourselves with our personality. In this sense, sociological theories are visible in different ways. On the one hand, personally, I take the view of Baker (2000), Cummins (2000) and Skutnabb-Kangas(2000), included in this article (Cummins, 2001) and their contributions about the benefits of bilingualism on children’s linguistic and educational development, such as children get a deeper understanding of language and how to use it and they also develop more flexibility in their thinking. However, I honestly doubt about other countributions like if children have to be taught in their mother tongue to have a good overall development, as they affirm in this text. According with Bernstein (1977), social factors can play an important role in the acquisition of language and if a child has grown up in a favoured environment, where models bring him/her a rich and assorted language, this child will increase his/her linguistic development. Related with this theory, school is not the only responsable of their educational development. Families and other social partners could make that culturally and linguitically diverse children had a great competence in their mother tongue and consequently they could prevent that children’s mother tongues were fragile and easily lost. An example could be British schools in Spain, where children learn in a foreing language and they get excellent resoults in their educational development, and in their communication competence of L1 as well. Taking …show more content…
Keith E. Nelson & Hillsdale, NJ (1985) reflect the input of the research of Elizabeth Peal and Wallace Lambert (1962) about advantages of bilingualism in cognitive habilities: “Bilingual children performed significantly higher than monolinguals on tests of both verbal and nonverbal abilities; […] Overall, bilinguals were found to have a more diversified pattern of abilities than their monolingual peers.” (page 322). Personally, it strikes me that nobody could doubt about the advantages of being a bilingual person. Moreover, according with the thesis Caño, Gómez, B., (2014), Larsen-Freeman (1991) emphasises that bilingualism besides give us a new language, it also prepares us to the learning of a third