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After taking two years of Spanish in high school, I feel like the
reason for not being able to use the language today is because of the time
period given. I can't imagine anyone being able to learn another language in
two academic years. My teacher in high school was using the repetitive
technique as his teaching method, but we would focus only on that one
particular topic for a few weeks and move on from it, for example the alphabet.
In our book it says, "A variety of techniques are important because of limited
language capacity "(As cited by Brown and Lee, 2015, p.142). My teacher should have added some different
teaching methods into his lessons that would be more beneficial to the
student’s retention of the information. I don’t remember ever doing any group
or paired work and from the research it shows the using different techniques
can help students learn different languages more efficiently. So when I left
his class I knew alphabet and basis beginner level functions, but since we only
took the language for two year and weren't required to continue exercising the
language I began to forget all that I had learned. If we want students to learn
second languages, why wouldn't we adjust the time frame from elementary to high
school? I believe we would have a better outcome of students graduating high
school being bilingual and more successful in their lives. I strongly believe
that bilingualism is a great asset to have, especially in Texas. We have so
much diversity in Texas, and with our previous history of being part of Mexico.
We have many Spanish history and a great percentage of Texans speak Spanish,
especially our cities close to the boarders such as San Antonio, Laredo, and
more. Since we do have many Spanish speaking citizen’s jobs are looking for bilingual
employees and most even get paid more for speaking two or more languages. After
reading the article The Cognitive Benefits of Bring Bilingual by Veronica
Marian and Anthony Shook I realized that being bilingual is more that making
more money it actually makes your brain activity increase. “For instance, when
bilingual people have to switch between naming pictures in Spanish and naming
them in English, they show increased activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex (DLPFC), a brain region associated with cognitive skills like attention
and inhibition”(Marian and Shook). For people that are bilingual in their
brains are constantly being exercised between their known languages, which can
allow the brain to strengthen and be able to process words faster. Being able
to process words faster means they can get more work done in a shorter amount
of time, therefore making them a more beneficial worker. I have said it in my
video blog and I will say it again, I believe that our education systems should
make learning another language a requirement starting in elementary school to
high school. We will be setting up our future leaders for success in their
futures.
Marian, Viorica, and Anthony Shook. “The
Cognitive Benefits of Being Bilingual.” Cerebrum: the Dana Forum on
Brain Science, The Dana Foundation, 31 Oct. 2012,
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3583091/.
Brown, Henry Douglas, and Heekyeong Lee. Teaching
by Principles: an Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. Pearson Longman, 2015.
