105 Learning Journal #9

[Ann Pongsakul]

As a bilingual person, I haven't personally felt like I'm smarter than my monolingual friends. The only thing I can think of is that I feel like I have better memory than most people I meet, but that goes for both monolingual and bilingual people I meet so I'm not sure about that. After reading the 2 articles, I feel kind of convinced that bilingual children have an advantage over their monolingual counterparts. While the advantages may be subtlly enhanced abilities in executive function, any benefit is better than no benefit. But I often associate the advantages of being bilingual with more cultural and social factors. Since most children who are bilingual are likely to be multicultural or have parents who come from another culture such as immigrant parents, the exposure they have to the different cultures than the ones they are surrounded by everyday open up their eyes to the world and the many possibilities. They see that there are many different kind of people and give them that cultural competency and be able to interact with people of different cultures than their own. At least, that is one benefit I think I have from being bilingual. Being able to speak more than one language also means you have the ability to communicate with even more people. I think people are really starting to tune into the benefits of being multilingual and the rise of bilingual immersion schools have been a part of that trend. I know people who have gone to French school in the U.S. all their lives and they're american, but that gave them the advantage of being able to attend university in France, completely conducted in French. Plus, tuition is a lot cheaper.