REFLECTION ON KIM POTOWSKY’S VIDEO “No Children Left Monolingual”
The talk of Kim Potowsky called “No child left monolingual” talks about the importance of multilingualism, therefore, it will try to crumble the two most important myths about multilingualism in order to reach the conclusion of promoting this instead of leaving monolingual children.
She also talks about the different bilingual programs in schools in order to enhance the learning of English in the USA and thus crumble the myth that immigrants aren’t learning English.
The two myths that she refers to are:
- Multilingualism is damaging to society
- Multilingualism is damaging to individuals
The percentage of immigration in the USA is very high, therefore, the fact of learning English for them is very important.
She comes from a family of immigrants and realized that the third generation (her) did not speak the language of the country of origin because they had struggled too much in learning English. And this fact is generalised.
She says that legislation does nothing to provide any practical assistance to anybody who’s trying to learn a language. So she mentions the idea that moves from “English nation” to “English plus nation”. This is the idea I agree with. I think adding always enriches more than limiting it.
She also says that bilingualism has lots of advantages, so there are several program options and school programmes at the USA with very good results and free. The ones that she presents in the talk are:
- All English: 100% in English
- Bilingual Education: 75% English 25% Spanish
- Two-way immersion: 10% English-90% Spanish and after a year change to 50%-50%
I think that in Catalonia the program used is nº1, but I agree on the idea that nº3 is the most useful one. When an immigrant arrives to school, he is directly involved in the classroom. Even though we have reception rooms in some centres, where they are helped to improve Catalan, and they only go there for 1 or 3 years depending on the origin, the level does not improve as much as it should be. Fact based on my experience.
There are two facts that I also heard at the schools I worked that she mentioned such as “tell parents not to speak their heritage language to the kids” and “the child will become confused” make me think, and I completely agree with the statement that he gives respect to them: for the first one that there’s no evidence of it and for the second that their brains are wired to be bilingual. Being proved that there are cognitive benefits for being bilinguals. And that the best age to learn a foreign language is between 8 and 10 years old because they use different parts of the brain.
So, Bilingualism is absolutely an advantage for both to individuals and to society.
Here you can see the video “No Children Left Monolingual”
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSs1uCnLbaQ[/youtube]