Reply to Talk to Me About Regret

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[quote=Anonymous]And one more note. Once again, there's no such thing as "true" bilingualism, any more than you can be a "true" American. It's a useless term. No, not even people raised with parents who speak OPOL will get you that; lots of studies have shown that people always have things they're more comfortable doing in one language than in another, even if those differences are subconscious. It's a continuum of abilities, and being much stronger in one language than the other(s) doesn't mean you aren't bi/multilingual unless you subscribe to a definition that pretty much no one in multilingual research or education still uses.

The kids I teach come into my classroom on a continuum. Some only speak Spanish. Some speak a mixture of that and English. Some speak primarily English and almost no Spanish (these are the worst ones, by the way, because they're most likely to have the same bad behaviors common to the monolingual English classrooms). However, these kids are already bilingual because they're being exposed in the classroom to a mixture of Spanish and English (mostly Spanish, but I do use a little English in certain areas). If they stick in the bilingual program, they'll learn to read, write, speak, and understand both languages comfortably over the long term. The ones who start learning the 2nd language in school will be sequential bilinguals while those who came into school with exposure to both will be simultaneous bilinguals. In the long term, it won't make a difference.

In other words, kids who go to immersion schools and retain abilities in additional languages [b]are[/b] multilingual. The degree to which they are will depend on a range of factors, but multilingualism is not something you only get if you hear all of the languages from home. That's just one more form of desperate elitism that we don't need on the way to a more civilized society.[/quote]

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