Bilingualism Essay -- Bilingual Education, Languages

worldThis paper is primarily intended to present some study considerations nearly bilingualism and bilingual education from a socio lingual perspective. In first instance, I will deal with some of the definitions of these terms placing them along the continuum since the high complexity of the issues. Also, some features of individual and social bilingualism will be pointed out, and some of the about common effects on individual and on communities will be presented. Finally, a reflection upon a kind of unnatural bilingualism is put forward.DefinitionsBasically, a bilingual person is said of that one(a) who knows and uses twain languages. More specifically, one who speaks, reads, or understands two languages equally well (Richards et al., 1992). The term bilingualism has been defined from various perspectives. As a matter of fact, disciplines like linguistics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics propose, according to their particular domain, a definition for bilingualism. In general terms, the bilingualism is characterized by the alternation of two languages. The problem arises when we neediness to define the extent of language competence a person must have to be called bilingual. The most known definitions of bilingualism come from Bloomfield (1933) who states that bilingualism is the native instruction of two languages similarly, Haugen (1969), argues that bilingualism is the use of complete and meaningful sentences in other languages and for Weinreich (1953), bilingualism occurs when two or more languages are used alternately by the akin persons (1970 1953). Clearly, those definitions (and others) may be situated along a continuum moving from a radical position to a more flexible one. For example, Macnama... ... educational foundation garment have the necessary elements of judgment and the required tools. For instance, if those tools are to measure linguistic competence, communicative competence and even pragmatic competence of the language involved.Finally, what really matters is that within our current world, where distance is dramatically reduced if non eliminated, the presentation of bilingual and multilingual communities have to be an asset for most societies. Nevertheless, the material body and implementation of such communities must be a question of conscious decisions. It is true that education is also dependent of political determination, but it is not less true that linguistic, cultural, and social factor must be guardedly incorporated. This means that language teachers and the scholars communities have a major role to play through serious and supported research projects.