WEEK 1 - EDUCATION

1. Link video:
https://youtu.be/MMmOLN5zBLY
2. Summary:
The aim of this video is to demonstrate the advantages of having a bilingual brain.
The speaker stated that understanding two or more languages causes the brain to look and
function differently than that of monolingual people. While a balanced bilingual has
nearly equivalent skill in both languages, most bilinguals know and use their languages in
different proportions around the world. They can be divided into three categories based
on their situation and how they learned each language. Gabriella's family was used by the
speaker as an example. Gabriella and her brother speak Spanish and English, while her
parents are most likely subordinate bilinguals who practice a secondary language by
passing it into their main language.
Besides, recent advancements in brain imaging technologies, however, have enabled
neurologists to see how basic facets of language learning impact the bilingual brain. The
left hemisphere of the brain is more prominent and pragmatic in cognitive processes,
while the right hemisphere is more involved in emotional and social processes.
According to this hypothesis, children acquire languages more quickly because their
developing brains enable them to use both hemispheres in language learning, while most
adults' language acquisition is lateralized to one hemisphere, typically the left. . If this is
the case, learning a language as a child can provide students with a more comprehensive
understanding of its social and emotional contexts.
Latest study, on the other hand, has found that people who learn a second language as an
adult have less emotional prejudice and a more realistic approach to challenges in the
second language than in their native language. Nonetheless regardless of whether people
learn new languages, being multilingual provides the brain with many benefits. For
example, a bilingual brain's increased activity during life will help to prolong the onset of
diseases like Alzheimer's and dementia for up to five years. Bilingualism was once
thought to be a handicap that slowed a child's growth by requiring them to expend too
much energy discriminating between languages, a belief founded primarily on faulty
research.
Otherwise, a more recent study found that bilingual students' response times and errors in
cross-language testing increased, it also pointed out that the initiative and concentration
required to exchange languages caused more activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex. This is the area of the brain responsible for executive control, problem solving,
task switching, and concentration while filtering out unnecessary information.
To conclude, bilingualism may not make students smarter but it can make their brain
healthier, more nuanced, and busy, and even if people didn't have the good fortune of
learning a second language as a teenager, it's never too late to do themselves a favor
because a little exercise will go a long way when it comes to their minds.
THE END