Bilingualism and second-language acquisition in early life must be encouraged as it has no effect on children’s cognitive development if given through appropriate teaching methodologies, scholars stressed.
Following the introduction of the new educational roadmap, various segments of the society rose arguments in relation to the potential impact of bilingualism on children’s development. Of all the arguments: Providing additional language course other than the mother tongue in early school ages would make children confused and might disturb their ability to develop normal cognitive functions. It may have negative impact to succeed in educational settings. On the other hand, learning a second language during infancy will lay better landmark for positive cognitive development in terms of the child’s ability to acquire new concepts or perform various calculations.
According to the Ethiopian Constitution Article 90:2, education shall be provided in a manner that is free from any religious influence, political partisanship or cultural prejudice. But, some politicians and activists in Ethiopia are often concerned that using a non-community language in school will disadvantage monolingual children. This assumption has no solid evidence for scholars who argue in favor of bilingualism.
Approached by The Ethiopian Herald, the well-known linguist at Addis Ababa University Prof. Baye Yimam commented that early years are important to acquire plenty of languages. Since learning starts in infancy, the only thing they can do is building vocabularies or can easily memorize words in parallel with their mother tongues; rather, it is hard to learn two languages after adolescence stage.
Prof. Baye stated that most of Ethiopian languages have the same syntactic structure (subject-object- verb order); so that if the language is given for children at the same methodology and in the same manner with their first language, it is the easier to memorize the simplest structures between the target languages.
“In a rich multilingual and multicultural nation, it is imperative that we should understand the positive impact of acquiring two or more language backgrounds; thereby to excel children’s cognitive and educational futures,” Prof. Baye suggested. Regarding the psychological aspect, Moges Ayele (PhD), Lecturer and Coordinator at the Department of Psychology in Addis Ababa University, stated that language acquisition is often related to cognitive development. Since their birth till school ages, children commonly show rapid development to percept and imitate words as well as understand meanings.
By the same token, children under ten years have the capability to understand and speak lots of languages. They will rather be more effective to fetch the horizons of many cultures and traditions, Dr. Moges explained. On the other hand, “If the words in different languages have similar connotation, these may interfere with the ability to understand or memorize them easily. But, it is unthinkable that these similarities would bring negative psychological impact on children’s cognitive development.”
As to Moges, children’s engagement to learn a second language during childhood will not surely affect the way they are going to master their mother tongue; since early bilingualism has no effect on their cognitive development as well. Despite little disadvantages, they are relatively minor and easily overcome.
Moges rather argued that there is no research yet that indicates early bilingualism holds back the ability to develop normal cognitive functions. Though the assumptions have been long rooted, these ideas have been vividly altered in a breakthrough studies that showed bilinguals are more advantageous than that of monolinguals in a wide range of school achievements as well as in social interactions, he explained.
The Ethiopian Herald, August 31/2019
BY ZELALEM GIRMA
