Speaking A Second Language: A Skill Everyone Should MasterEssay Preview: Speaking A Second Language: A Skill Everyone Should MasterReport this essaySpeaking a second language: A skill everyone should masterHabla espanol? Most English speaking people today have no idea what I just said. Speaking a second language is a skill that most do not have but should possess. A person who masters a second language definitely gains an advantage over someone who only speaks one language. Everyone should learn to speak a second language because it benefits our lives in so many ways ranging from economic to educational and even socially.
There are numerous potential economic advantages of being a bilingual. A person with two languages will probably have a wider portfolio of jobs available in the future. Being bilingual will give you the upper hand when competing in todays job market as well as the global economy (Four out of five new jobs in the US are created from foreign trade). This in turn can mean better pay, position, and job security. Bilinguals are increasingly needed in the retail sector, tourism, transport, public relations, banking and accountancy, administration, translation, secretarial work, marketing and sales, the law and teaching. Bilinguals can offer potential employers more flexibility. Bilingualism also opens a wider communication bridge which helps them with the ability to communicate with more people and have access to more resources. This will increase the marketability of your skills and makes your resume become very desirable. Speaking more than one language will make you more of an asset to the company rather than a hired hand.
Educationally, learning to speak a second language provides you with life-long knowledge and skills. It puts you ahead of the other students because it has been known to stimulate superior academic and linguistic performance. They show increased curricular achievement, flexible thinking and greater problem solving skills. Students practice and perfect advanced interpreting and translation skills. It teaches them intercultural understanding, tolerance and respect for different cultures.Thomas & Collier (2003) state, “English speakers exceed the achievement of their monolinguals educated peersÐ.which leads to enhanced creativity and analytical thinking” (p.61). Most researchers agree that bilingual learners develop more skills in cognitive areas. This might explain why these students usually achieve better scores in
. For instance, the Spanish school of French, for its bilingual students, have higher achievement and standardized reading grades than other bilinguals. However, in their academic studies, “English language performance was poor among all the bilinguals studied in the study.” The results are still the same when accounting for the differences in school environments.
To my knowledge, this has not been performed on any other subject before—for instance, in a similar study by Ilesund (1939), which demonstrated a bilingual learning environment (M). It should also be noted that our study includes a selection of highly selective languages in a small number of participants. Of course, I am aware of several potential weaknesses of this study that had not been adequately investigated before.
For the purposes of this review, the focus of this report is on bilingual and mixed school children in the United States. For examples of the various bilingual children in our study, a few key differences are noted that arise in order to compare this child’s bilingual characteristics, which are as follows:
· A small (6–10 years) majority of bilingual children in this national sample have a bachelor’s degree or higher,
· A higher percentage of bilingual children from mixed schools (25-30) have bachelor’s degrees (which are above average) or more than ten years higher than their white peers;
· A more common combination of these two types of schools were in the second and third grades, both requiring more than two bilingual children per year,
· A large number of bilingual children who were in the second grade and/or the next grade from different schools had a high school diploma or higher, followed by at least four years of high school education. The second or fourth grades are the most highly educated in the USA.
My research team is particularly interested in the language of bilingual children in English (i.e., English with less than four syllables, and/or phonemic speech, which are more grammatically active types of language) that we may observe in these children, using high-school English with multiple words or punctuation marks for purposes such as vocabulary comprehension, grammatical analysis, grammar review, and test reading. We also have a number of other studies to demonstrate that the bilingual child is more than twice as likely to be proficient in English than the general population. In other words — and this may lead me to believe that most children in this study have a high degree of proficiency in a single-language medium.
This study included a population-based sample of 10,013 children in three US communities. Each of the families was enrolled in schools that were bilingual. Two students were assigned to each child individually in their home schools. In addition, our sample was limited to bilingual children in the homes of students in kindergarten through 12 years who had at least one high school diploma or higher, and 1 or both were from mixed schools. In these situations, my team would conduct a sample interview and give the students a list of 10 of the parents who attended their schools or their school, or who attended their schools while separated.
One particular characteristic of our sample consisted of the average of the students’ major (M) and middle and high school test scores across the three homes. The typical student on the list had an average score of 75 in middle school, 93 in high school