English 101 - Dr. Mandy Suhr-Sytsma
BLOGGING ABOUT MULTILINGUALISM
As I wrote in my first blog post about moving to the United States and learning English while in high school, I thought to discuss about being a bilingual and the benefits of being able to speak multiple languages. In-class, we have several students who can speak multiple languages and we touched on the topic of how the ability to speak multiple languages allows for increased understanding of translingual orientation. Not only does this idea of translingual orientation increase with the ability to speak many languages, but so do biological cognitive and executive functions of the brain.
I found a very interesting article on the New York Times from 2012 that talks about the several benefits of being a bilingual. The article outlines recent research that has shown that the bilingual experiences improves attention processes that people use for "planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks." As a result of this, students can stay focused longer on tasks and short-term memory capacity increases. I thought that it's very interesting to think that just the ability to comprehend and understand another language can have such drastic benefits on people's brain. I guess that I have now better cognitive and executive functions than when I was monolingual and couldn't speak English. Maybe even all that time students spend in Spanish and French class - for example - isn't used on just learning to speak and write in a different dialect, but also at the same time on improving the health and capacity of the brain. Bhattacharjee, Yudhijit. "Why Bilinguals Are Smarter." The New York Times. The New York Times, 17 Mar. 2012. Web. 28 Jan. 2015.
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For my first blog post, I thought I could discuss about my personal experiences with multilingualism. I was born and raised in Helsinki, Finland but moved to the United States just a little over four years ago. In my family, we only spoke Finnish, but I was learning English in middle school since age 12. Then at age 14, I moved to the United States and began high school in English. I was completely overwhelmed with being exposed to a brand new language and culture. My freshman year of high school was mostly spent on trying to assimilate to a new culture while learning English at the same time.
During my first year of high school, I was quickly able to become fluent in English. All of my teachers were surprised by how quickly this occurred. Within just few months, my grades dramatically improved as I was able to think in English and not translate anymore from Finnish to English in my head. I think this has to a great extent to do with this idea of translingual orientation and how languages connect in several different fashions. I think this idea of translingual orientation that Suresh Canagarajah in his piece Translingual Practice discusses, relates to the experience that I have gone through with learning English at such a dramatic rate. Canagarajah speaks of how monolinguals have the ability to be translingual, because many languages interconnect. I found several parallels between English and Finnish grammar that helped me to translate and understand English, and then truly absorb the English language while only 14. I think that English and Finnish aren't that distant as languages, compared to let's say Mandarin Chinese and Finnish. I think that these parallels aided my English language learning substantially. Canagarajah, A. Suresh. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013. Print. |
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April 2015
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