Bilingualism In The Caribbea

1082 Words5 Pages
Introduction In Colombia exists two policies that are not in synergy with one another, and this leaves a social gap which has been the inspiration for the development of this project. The first one is the early childhood Colombian legislation which was created to guarantee children proper care and high educational opportunities, without discriminating them for their physical or socioeconomic condition; however, it does not consider bilingualism under their education plans. On the other hand, the second policy pertains to the Colombian bilingualism program that was launched to ensure Colombians' exposure to the English language until it can soon be recognized as its second official language, yet it excluded early childhood from it. Moreover,…show more content…
First language acquisition. In regard to human beings' mother tongue development, Chomsky (1965) declares through his universal grammar theory that children are born with the capability of understanding and analyzing the syntax of any language they are exposed to and extract its grammatical rules to make new sentences. The author labels this skill were children experiment with the language “the creative aspect of a language”. Second language acquisition. One of the expositors of this field is Weinreich (1953) who claims that there are two different denominations of bilinguals. The compound bilinguals are the ones that learn both languages at the same time and the coordinate ones which learn one after the other. Thus, it can be determined that the three to five-year old children that were part of this implementation are considered coordinate bilingual as they have already acquired their listening and speaking skills in Spanish. However, given that there is a lot of vocabulary that they have not acquired yet; they may have the opportunity of enjoying the benefits of being compound bilinguals with the new knowledge to come. According to the author, compound bilinguals differ from the coordinate ones since they are able to simultaneously translate faster and with less

More about Bilingualism In The Caribbea

Open Document