Bilingual Children Essay

1580 Words7 Pages
Bilingual children: Language, culture and identity clashes. Language choice for individuals who are bilingual is vital to the creation of a personal identity and it is a powerful social tool for cultural transformation. This essay explores the key issues that bilingual children may encounter in prior to school and school settings which includes linguistic and cultural clashes such as how they negotiate between their ethnic and “mainstream” cultures, how these clashes and problems influence their relationship with their families and their identities as a whole and how losing their primary language or learning a second language can affect their educational development. The work of Lily Wong Fillmore (1991), Sapna Vyas (2004) and Roger Barnard (2003) will be explored in this paper to develop an understanding of these 3 key issues and their importance in bilingual education as future educators of children. The first key issue to be examined is how bilingual children are forced to negotiate between their ethnic and “mainstream” cultures by making linguistic adjustments in order to participate in today’s society. Children learning a second language experience extreme pressure when entering classrooms of English speaking in schools. As stated in Fillmore (1991, pg 342) children feel that in order to be accepted into this new social setting they must learn English as they begin to realise that they are ‘different’ and feel that this change is necessary in order to participate and fit in to their ‘new world’. They are motivated to stop using their primary language and give up on this cultural aspect of their identity before they have even completely mastered English as their second language. The younger the children are when they experience these ‘assimilative forces’ the greater the effect is on losing their primary language all together. “Children have simply not reached
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