Bilingualism Essay

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Contents: 1. Introduction;Bilingualism 2.Crucial Departure Points when Thinking about Bilingualism: The degree of bilingualism The context of bilingual language acquisition Age of acquisition Domain of use Social orientation 3.Bilingual Acquisition 4.Bilingualism and Cognitive Ability 5.Educations and Literacy in Bilingual Settings 6.Attitudes and Bilingualism 7.Reference 1-Introduction;Bilingualism BaetensBeardsmore’s comment that ‘bilingualism’ as a term has open-ended semantics’(1982:1).In other words ,the term bilingualism may mean different things to different people as there is no definition of bilingualism. For the average speaker,bilingualism can be loosely defined as the use of two languages or the native like control of two languages. In reality,most bilinguals probably fall somewhere in the middle of this continuum. 2-Crucial Departure Points when Thinking about Bilingualism: The degree of bilingualism: Degree of bilingualism refers to the levels of linguistic proficiency which a bilingual must achieve in both languages to be considered as a bilingual. BaetensBeardsmore(1982)described two extremes of[Bloomfield’s] and[Mackey’s and Weinreich’s] as : Maximalist approach towards bilingualism Bloomfield(1933:55) defined bilingualism as ‘native- like control of two languages’. This approach describes the ideal bilingual who will find nomatch in reality.This is equally unsatisfactory because it fails to make a distinction between those who have only minimal communicative ability in a second language and those who use the language actively in their daily lives in a large range of settings. Minimalist approach towards bilingualism Mackey(1962:52) defined bilingualism as ‘the ability to use more than one language.’ In a similar way to Mackey,Weinreich(1953) defined

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