Pediatric Insider: Bilingual Children By Roy Benaroch

Today, America is known as the melting pot because of the huge array of different races, cultures, and languages from around the world. There are over 14 million households in America where English is not the primary language. Within the 14 million households are people who are going to want an education, and jobs which allows for a very competitive society. Primary English speakers will need to learn a second language in order to compete with immigrants that already know two or more languages. In America's growing, diverse society bilingual education should be available to all students at the elementary level. Young children have rapidly developing brains which makes them very susceptible to learning more than one language. In the article

In the article, "Pediatric Insider: Bilingual Children" the author, Roy Benaroch addresses parent concerns on their fears of their children being confused between the two languages. Benaroch states, "Many good studies have shown that simultaneous bilingualism--raising children to speak two languages at the same time-- doesn't cause or contribute to speech delays or speech language problems"(Benaroch 1). Children will not be confused while learning a second language because if they are taught the two languages separately, one language for the first half of a school day then a second language for the second half of school, then they will automatically know how to differentiate between both languages. Some Bilingual kids may be delayed at first but after a couple of months of learning the language, they will often surpass speech skills of their monolingual peers. In the article, "New Language and Communication Science Findings Reported from Northwestern University" Researchers perform a test on bilingual and monolingual children ages 7-10, "The task was to identify the agent of a sentence in the presence of verbal interference"(Northwestern). Their findings were, "that bilinguals are more accurate than monolinguals in comprehending syntactically complex sentences in the presence of linguistic noise"(Northwestern). Bilingual children do not get confused between their two languages instead, they are ahead. This research shows that bilingual children can differentiate between the syntactically complex sentence and the linguist noise while monolingual children could not. Bilingual children naturally have that skill because they already have to differentiate between two languages so,