In this video, Kim Potowski tries to encourage multilingualism and talks about the bilingual situation in the USA’s academic system.
She centres her speech on immigration to illustrate how immigrant languages are treated in the American territory and uses her own experience to make her point.
Her grandparents were immigrants from Lithuania and had to learn English to survive in their new country, becoming therefore bilingual. However, their offspring received a much bigger input of English since it was used at school and everywhere outside their home. Consequently, the English language completely substituted their mother tongue and the next generations never used it or learnt it.
Another influence to this phenomenon of language loss is the fact that schools only focused on English and didn’t teach immigrant languages. Fortunately, this situation is changing little by little nowadays, but Kim Potowski remarks that “we still have a long way to go”. She mentions that the USA doesn’t encourage heritage languages enough and American people don’t usually make the effort of learning a non-English language, probably because they don’t feel the need for it. Using her own words, America “exhibits and promotes monolingualism in English”.
Nevertheless, the situation is not as terrible as it may seem. Schools are currently more aware of the different languages that can be found within its walls in the present, and that is why several of them are becoming bilingual in order to promote linguistic diversity. In the end, by promoting the heritage languages of immigrants, the nation can learn to communicate in different languages and it can lead to numerous advantages, not only in communicative terms but also in relation to global commerce for example.
As Kim Potowski explains, research has proven that bilingual lessons help immigrants to learn English. If they are given 100% English lessons, they don’t understand the explanations as well as they should and they fall behind. Through bilingualism and two-immersion programmes, they receive the important instructions in their first language and it helps them improve much faster because they understand what is being explained and what they are supposed to do.
Even parents who are monolingual in English are trying to make their children learn a new language or even more than one. The problem is that, typically, kids start learning a new language in high school at the age of 14 approximately and that is way too late.
Cognitive research discovered that different parts of the brain are used at language learning before and after the age of 8, which is commonly known as organic memory. That is why two-immersion programmes are important as well as starting language learning in kindergarten, always through programmes based on meaningful content.
Schools and society need to integrate all languages, foster heritage languages because bilingualism has proven to have numerous advantages. It improves problem solving skills, delays dementia or Alzheimer about 10 years and also promotes better acquisition of a 3rd or 4th language. And these are just a few examples of its benefits.
In Spain, the situation is not so different from that of the USA: English acquisition has become highly important and not much attention is being given to other languages.
Society is aware of the importance of English around the world, and that is why nowadays English teaching starts at Pre-primary. It is not until high school that students start learning French or German, which means that in the previous stages of the educative system only English is taught as a foreign language.
Kim Potowski talks about the importance of starting language acquisition at a young age and using meaningful contents as well as promoting two-immersion programmes to promote better acquisition of the foreign language. Here in Barcelona, the educational system seems to agree with her especially on the first two aspects.
People are aware of the high abilities kids have to learn a language when they are young, and parents want their children to start learning as soon as possible. For this reason, English teaching in schools starts when pupils are 3 years old and several private centres develop English lessons even for babies.
Besides, in order to use meaningful contents, schools started integrating CLIL a few years ago. This way they use the language as a tool to teach another subject instead of focussing on grammatical aspects and this new method has proven to be quite effective regarding English acquisition.
However, as was mentioned previously, foreign language teaching focuses basically on English and doesn’t integrate or foster other languages, which I believe should change. I’m not saying it is easy because it definitely isn’t, but schools should promote plurilingualism as well as the acceptance and fostering of different cultures and languages.
In the end, we live in a world in which many different cultures coexist within a same territory and they shouldn’t be undermined or excluded, because that is just a sign of intolerance.
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