One of our school’s strongest assets is the IB program and its strong focus on bilingual education. From the earliest years of school, WIS students are immersed in a foreign language environment in order to learn to communicate and understand a new language. Why is bilingual education something so valuable and important, and why does our school take so much pride in it?
Our view of bilingualism has grown to become very different from how we viewed it in the beginning of the 20th century. Back then, speaking multiple languages was viewed as something distracting and something that would harm IQ level.
Being proficient in multiple languages obviously has an advantage in the real world because it’s so practical – it opens doors to more opportunities like in terms of jobs, travel and living in different countries. Over the past 20 years, there’s been a breakthrough explosion of research about multilingualism in terms of neuroscience. The scientists behind this are beginning to understand that those who speak multiple languages have benefits in high cognitive performance (memory, problem solving) which reflects on everyday things such as school performance, attention, and multitasking.
Does speaking multiple languages and having a background in bilingual education have an advantage in the college admission process? In order to find out, I interviewed some college admission officers from a variety of different universities. Dayna Niwa Krakower, a college admission officer at Brown University says: “We read each applicant’s file in its entirety. Every component of the application conveys important information, but a student’s accomplishments as a high school student will have the most influence on our admission decision.” She later elaborated that the admission process is holistic and focused on the student’s achievements and an evaluation on whether they have the potential to thrive within the opportunities that Brown provides. Universities seek “intelligent, highly motivated students from all walks of life who have diverse backgrounds, interests, and cultural heritages.”
There has also been recent research observing that speaking another language slows the development or various brain conditions, one of which includes Alzheimer’s disease (AD). This research took place in the January 30 Proceedings (2017) of the National Academy of Sciences and claims that those who speak multiple languages form stronger connections between specific regions of the brain than monolinguals, which allows adaptation to age-related reductions in brain functions.
