Skip to content General cognitive, social, and economic benefits of language immersion
- Fully proficient bilingual children outperform monolingual children in the areas of divergent thinking, pattern recognition, and problem solving.
- Bilingual children develop the ability to solve problems that contain conflicting or misleading cues at an earlier age, and they can decipher them more quickly than monolinguals.
- Cross-cultural competency skills open up employment possibilities; high-level, high-paying employment will demand competence in more than one language.
- Immersed students are able to communicate with a much wider range of people from many different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
- Immersion environments help students learn a target language naturally, native-like.
- Metalinguistic: The ability to think how various parts of a language function, such as phonological awareness and knowledge of letter-sound correspondences for word decoding.
Specific reason for starting language immersion as early as daycare
- It is extraordinarily easy for children to learn languages; they are literally little language sponges starting at the age of 6 months until about the age of 10.
- Young learners are naturally inquisitive and are actually able to absorb languages from all angles.
- Learning a foreign language includes understanding the foreign culture as well as assimilating cultural awareness and compassion for others with different backgrounds.
- Placing your children in an environment where they need to try harder to understand and be understood is a very efficient way to teach compassion.
