Resumen del video "Language and Learning".

The Language and Learning video talks about learning many languages from childhood to adult age.

This video was issued on Tv0 channel, in the program called Your voice, where  three professionals of different areas appear:

-          Ellen Bialystok is a psychologist at York University.

-          Laura-Ann Petitto is a Psychologist at University of Toronto.

-          Peter  Grazzellone is a teacher of Ryerson Community School.

They discuss their opinions about the topic, trying to answer if children learn many languages; they will be smarter than others.

Ellen talks about different items:

On the one hand she thinks that knowing a language means being able to speak and write it, but not necessarily being an expert.

On the other hand she comments that children easily start to learn languages from their birth to five years old.

However, everybody could continue learning languages after their turn five. In this case, it is necessary that children or adults are exposed to these languages in different contexts.

In addition, Ellen thinks that learning many languages is good because two languages can create connections in the brain between both of them. Moreover, human thought is based in the language, therefore, the learning languages is beneficious for mental processes and she recommends that children learn multiple languages.

Referring to the main subject, Ellen comments that plurilingual children are neither more intelligent nor less clever than monolingual children.

Laura talks about three items:

Firstly, she thinks that the mind has not compartments. The brain works up in a global way, therefore, if we study languages as soon as possible, we will learn other languages more easily.

Secondly, she agrees with Ellen, in that exposure is necessary for achieving lingual skills; in other words, Laura believes that someone that becomes a plurilingual speaker needs contexts where the learnt languages could be equally used.

In the children case for example, they could be exposed to different languages out of school as in a TV program, with songs etc.

Thirstly, Laura comments that many parents believe that their children should not study different languages because they mixt words from both of them. However, this fact isn’t bad as the bilingual children will select the dominant language and this mixing will not persist in the future.

She advises parents not to be worried if their children are plurilingual.

Peter works as a teacher in a plurilingual school, where second languages are taught using task-based methodology.

He supports the benefits of plurilingualism and encourages parents to visit their schools and get involved in their programmes.

As a conclusion, the video shows some ideas that have been discussed in the class. For example: plurilinguism has been defined and we have been studied its history. Moreover, we have been dealing with the idea that speakers always have a dominant language.

Lately, we commented that it is necessary using the languages in order not to forget them.