The monthly newsletter
Issue 90 | February 2013 | www.ei-india.com
This Month’s Issue Enhancing Emotional ...... 01 The Value of Sports ......... 02 MHTP ............................. 03 I Rise Everyday ............... 04 Thoughtful Story ............ 05 Why Spend Time ............. 06 Teacher’s Bite ................. 07 Interesting Facts ............. 08
Learning a New Language Bilingualism in childhood can significantly influence the course and efficiency of children’s cognitive development and is a crucial concern in today’s society. Research has shown that bilingualism does not trigger confusion; has no inherent negative impact on children’s development; and even has some sociocognitive advantages. Bilingual children not only understand others’ beliefs and communication needs but also solve problems, with two possible interpretations of the same stimulus at once. They also achieve higher scores than monolingual children on a number of cognitive ability tests, including mental flexibility and non-verbal problemsolving tasks. Bilingual Kids Don't Have to Reinvent the Alphabet The potential for the transfer of reading principles across languages is noticeable when bilingual children use the methods and insights they've built up in one language and apply them to advance much more rapidly in another language. They don't have to relearn the concept of an alphabet in English if they've learnt it already in French. Learning a New Language Teaches
you More about Your Own A child setting out to learn a new language learns how languages work. The knowledge of English grammar is
commonly solidified by learning a foreign language. These insightful discoveries happen as a child's speech and thoughts evolve from simple expressions of needs to dramatic narrations of events, overflowing with new and descriptive vocabulary. Second-language learners take a long time to develop their second-language oral proficiency. Even after five to six years in a second-language environment, children may not speak as fluently as their monolingual peers. In the early stages of the acquisition of a second language, children learning two languages may show some developmental lags relative to children speaking only one. However,
these lags are typically small and don’t last for long periods of time. In terms of general language proficiency, bilingual children tend to have a smaller vocabulary in each language than monolingual children. Nonetheless, their understanding of linguistic structure is at least as good as and often better than that of comparable monolinguals. The ability to break words into their components, synthesize their sounds and learn their features, and to some extent verbal working memory are some of the issues in reading development and reading difficulties in monolingual children. These processing skills measured in monolingual and secondlanguage children often correlate with each other. Second-language learners with decoding and spelling problems in their first language have difficulties in their second language as well. Finally, second-language learners with serious problems in word-based reading skills and the cognitive processes necessary to develop good wordbased skills in the second language also have poor reading fluency, reading comprehension and writing skills.