Bilingual two-way immersion programs provide an effective instructional approach for both minority-language and majority-language elementary-school students. Students … show improved math and reading performance... (The) ability to communicate in two languages and interact with a larger proportion of the population is likely an asset for these students as they enter an increasingly globalized world. We conclude that two-way immersion models are beneficial in multiple ways ... (Biling, 2013, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health)
In the last five years,the demand for employees in the United States who know more than one language has more than doubled, according to a report recently released by the New American Economy.
In 2010, there were roughly 240,000 job postings aimed at bilingual workers. But by 2015, that figure swelled to about 630,000. Demand (is) for both low and high-skilled positions such as financial managers, editors, and industrial engineers.
Research consistently points to advantages for bilinguals, including:
- enhanced cognitive skills
- ability to employ necessary cognitive and social strategies
- use of situational clues to promote understanding
- enhanced abilities in divergent thinking (the understanding that there is more than one way to look at a problem, and therefore more than one solution is possible)
- ability to think flexibly and abstractly about language
- enjoyment of linguistic possibilities
- early emergence of the concept that there are multiple ways to express the same idea
- transfer of skills and knowledge from one language to another
Multilingualism has been shown to have many social, psychological and lifestyle advantages. Research in the last decade by neurologists, psychologists and linguists, using the latest brain-imaging tools, is revealing a swathe of cognitive benefits for bilinguals. It’s all to do with how our ever-flexible minds learn to multitask. (BBC, 2016)
