Misunderstandings About Bilingualism

Abstract

The importance of language skills and the ability to communicate and interact with the surrounding environment is critical in the early stages of development in a child. Communication and social skills, along with learning and expressing themselves in order to interact, is highly important during the developmental period in a child’s life. These critical issues have induced the interest and concerns by both parents and researchers to explore and study the effects of bilingualism. In this paper, we will take a look at the most common myths and misunderstandings about bilingualism. Today, there are many parents who still believe that learning multiple languages can cause language delay and low intelligence due to the misunderstanding

Not only are the parents of the bilingual children, but also some educators worried and concerned about when a child starts to speak different languages in a sentence. Are these children really confused and not able to distinguish the languages that are being used? The confusion may come from the fact that many people are confused between code switching and language interference, therefore mixing up languages is thought to be part of linguistic deficits and bilingualism is the reason to blame. Especially to the monolinguals, mixing two or more languages in a conversation is a sign of language deficit and it shows disrespect to the culture, as well as the language. As a matter of fact, language interference is linguistic interference that comes from the native language and affects phonology, grammar, lexis and orthography in second language output, while code switching simply means that when a speaker uses or mixes two or more languages in a sentence or conversation to another bilingual person (Skiba,

Being bilingual in the era of globalization opens up many doors to the world as well as opportunities to a brighter career and future. The myths and misunderstandings of bilingualism has to be corrected and in order for them to come to an end, since they were proven by scientific researchers that they were nothing more than just myths from the past. Parents, educators along with researchers play an important role in spreading the facts about bilingualism to avoid future confusion especially to many new bilingual families. Aside from that, motivation from parents is the main key for a bilingual child to learn and excel in both languages to achieve a balance in order to be successful in the future. It is also important for the parents to guide and monitor a child’s learning development. There are many limitations and difficulties to attain accurate results on the differences of bilinguals and monolinguals, however, researchers and educators are positive about the benefits of being bilingual or multilingual. Hopefully new research and studies in the near future will be able to solve the questions and