There are not only expatriate families that are thinking about the importance of teaching their kids to be bilingual. The fact that more people in the world are bilingual than monolingual, indicates that you are bound to meet people that may speak another language as their first language.
“Furthermore, because of the movement of population all over the world and in particular the flood of immigrants to Western nations, it is foolhardy to ignore bilingualism as a phenomenon that surrounds you even if you yourself are basically monolingual.” (Carol Myer-Scotton, Multiple Voices)
The inevitable fact that we live in a constant moving and globalizing world where people through work or social interaction meet regardless of their cultural background, there is a growing need for people to broaden their language perspective.
Bilingual schools or bilingual pre-schools are types of education that for reasons mentioned above are experiencing a growing demand from parents who see the importance of giving their children a bilingual education.
Sonya Maechler- Dent is an eager supporter of bilingualism and the founder of the Tandem Pre-School with three locations in the Canton of Zurich (Zurich, Uetikon am See and Zollikon). She supports the idea of “Multilingualism as a tool to develop children’s communication skills as well as developing their cognitive skills…She hopes to encourage multiculturalism through developing multilingualism and to prepare, if only a few, children towards this broad perspective and to hence create a few bridges between the international community and the Swiss community.”
In the Zurich area and all over Switzerland there are a lot of private schools that are promoting bilingualism, but looking from a parent’s perspective what does one really need to know about bilingual schools or pre-schools? Is the education really bilingual or do many of these so called bilingual schools promote bilingualism as a way to get more customers? And what is a good bilingual pre-school?
What is bilingualism and when should one start to learn another language?
People who only speak one language, are monolingual, while people speaking more than one language is bilingual or multilingual. In a broad definition, one can be bilingual actively and passively. Actively meaning speaking and writing a language number two, while a passively bilingual can understand but not speak- can read but not write in language number two.
According to the famous linguist Noam Chomsky, every human has a “language acquisition device” – a mechanism which enables an individual to recreate the rules of grammar that speakers around the learner use- However this device, according to Chomsky, wears out over time and by puberty it is gone. This explanation promotes to learn a second language at an early stage.
>> continue reading this article
* PRIVATE SCHOOLS
* PUBLIC SCHOOLS
* KINDERGARTEN
* VOCATIONAL SCHOOLS
----------------------------------------------
* MONTESORRI EDUCATION
* RUDOLF STEINER SCHOOLS
----------------------------------------------
* BILINGUAL SCHOOLS
* BILINGUAL UPBRINGING
* FOREIGN LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION
IN EARLYCHILDHOOD ----------------------------------------------
* Deutsch für fremdsprachige Kinder
* Learning the language of the
country in which you live * Becoming bilingual: How to help
children learn more than one language----------------------------------------------
* ARCHIVE