Understanding the Benefits of Bilingualism in Children

PPT Reader s Bank Level 10 Unit 09

33 / p. 92 Reader s Bank Level 10 Dear Neighbor, Welcome to our neighborhood. You have chosen to live in a residential neighborhood filled with people who go to work in the morning and retired people. We request that you live like a good neighbor. Last night, you kept at least 5 families, including 10 young children and 15 adults, awake until 2 a.m. As outlined in the attached City of Cape Coral Noise *Ordinance, you have an obligation to adhere to noise levels that are acceptable in a residential neighborhood. The attached pages are *excerpts from the ordinance that describes what the noise limitations are and the penalties for violating them. You, as a tenant, come under the ordinance, as do your landlord. *ordinance , *excerpt [ ]

34 _1 / p.94 Reader s Bank Level 10 My grandparents, first-generation immigrants, diligently avoided speaking together in Polish in the presence of their children in order to make sure that my parents would learn only English. They thought that it might be confusing for children to be simultaneously exposed to two languages, and that their mastery of language would be faster if they were exposed to just one language. That reasoning is a very unreasonable concern: a child learning two languages must learn twice as many speech sounds, words, and grammatical structures as a monolingual child; the bilingual child has only half as much time to devote to each language; and so the bilingual child may end up speaking two languages poorly, instead of speaking one language well.

34 _2 / p.94 Reader s Bank Level 10 In fact, studies until the 1960s did report that bilingual children were significantly ___________ linguistically compared to monolingual children, and ended up with smaller vocabularies in each language. But more recent studies showed that both bilingual and monolingual children end up as adults with essentially the same vocabulary size and word-retrieval rate, or else the monolingual children end up with a slight advantage (vocabulary up to 10% larger in their sole language). However, it would be misleading to summarize this result by saying, Monolingual children end vocabulary: 3,300 versus only 3,000 words. Instead, the result is, Bilingual children end up with a much larger vocabulary: a total of 6,000 words, consisting of 3,000 English words plus 3,000 Chinese words, instead of 3,300 English words and no Chinese words. up with a slightly larger

35 / p.96 Reader s Bank Level 10 We write to express our heartfelt concern over the inadvertent loss of the laptop box which had been left in your room when you checked out the other day. The laptop box was among those items which had been collected for disposal by our housekeeping staff. As soon as you informed us of your need to retrieve this item, however, we immediately proceeded to look for it at our waste segregation facilities. Unfortunately, the laptop box could not be found anywhere. Given the situation that our personnel had no reason to believe that the discarded item contained important information to you, we trust that you will excuse the deliberate disposal of the item.

36 _1 / p.98 Reader s Bank Level 10 Marriage According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center in the USA, 25 percent of millennials, those who were born from the early 1980s to 2000, don t want to get married. Another report by Urban Institute predicted that many people would stay unmarried until the age of 40. Statistics have shown that the declining interest in marriage is not just limited to the U.S. It is a worldwide phenomenon. What is behind this phenomenon? Relationship experts say that it is due to the rise of pluralism: the idea that there is more than one right way of doing things. As society became more diverse, people began to assert their individualistic needs more and more, and traditional marriage can t meet everyone s needs.

36 _2 / p.98 Reader s Bank Level 10 Some people might want to live with their loved ones, but they have no desire for temporary commitment. Others might want to have a short-term trial marriage to see if they are right for each other. As society is changing rapidly, so is people s attitude toward marriage. At this rate, no one can tell what kind of marriage will become the norm in the next 100 years.