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标题: 纽约时报的一篇关于孩子双语教育的文章，拿来分享 [打印本页]

作者: lovecheesecake 时间: 2012-3-27 06:51
标题: 纽约时报的一篇关于孩子双语教育的文章，拿来分享
大意说双语会让孩子更聪明，大人减缓老年痴呆（坎比脑白金阿，决定不给爹妈买脑白金了，让他们学phonics得了）。联想起老公的一个同学是个会说5种语言的瑞士人，此人的确聪明绝顶。

SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.

This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.

They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.

Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle.

In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task.

The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.

Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.

The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.

The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life).

In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not.

Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.

Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint?

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a staff writer at Science.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 25, 2012

The Gray Matter column on bilingualism last Sunday misspelled the name of a university in Spain. It is Pompeu Fabra, not Pompea Fabra.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 18, 2012, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Bilinguals Are Smarter.

作者: 我是花园 时间: 2012-3-27 07:32
支持

瑞士是北欧吧，北欧国家的人英语都非常好哦

我听一个朋友说，一个外国人到中国来学中文，住了一年不到，就能说一些中文并交流了，因为中国人不会说英语，在中文环境下学中文就容易些

然后到北欧的丹麦想学丹麦语，他和丹麦人说话，人家看到不会说丹麦语，就立刻和他说英语了，结果在丹麦一点也学不到丹麦语

作者: 童童ma咪 时间: 2012-3-28 22:53
双语教育，那要一个很强的妈或者很强的爹

作者: lululah 时间: 2012-3-29 08:37
进来学习一下。谢谢小奶酪妈妈的分享。

原帖由 童童ma咪 于 2012-3-28 22:53 发表
双语教育，那要一个很强的妈或者很强的爹

楼上版主妈咪是强妈了。。。

作者: 我是花园 时间: 2012-3-29 11:31

原帖由 lululah 于 2012-3-29 08:37 发表
进来学习一下。谢谢小奶酪妈妈的分享。

楼上版主妈咪是强妈了。。。

啥啥啥？我上下看了好几次，童童妈妈的上面就是我，你你你..不会说强妈就是我吧？？？？

天啊，如果你是说我的话，我可以告诉你啊，我英语最差了，

我也只能读读分级读物了，因为有音频啊，绘本我基本现在都读不起来，

而且我从来都没有双语过啊，因为没有那个水平哇

作者: 我爱飞飞 时间: 2012-3-29 21:14
标题: 回复 #5 我是花园的帖子
绘本可以把书和音频配配套，你先听听音频试试。
如果觉得不难，就和孩子一起听也行。
如果还觉得难，就多听一些次数，听熟了，不难了，你自己学着念给孩子听吧。

作者: 我是花园 时间: 2012-3-30 08:25

原帖由 我爱飞飞 于 2012-3-29 21:14 发表
绘本可以把书和音频配配套，你先听听音频试试。
如果觉得不难，就和孩子一起听也行。
如果还觉得难，就多听一些次数，听熟了，不难了，你自己学着念给孩子听吧。

不过带音频的绘本很少很少吧

作者: 风中缘 时间: 2012-3-30 10:27
标题: 回复 #7 我是花园的帖子
绘本音频应该不少
见过一个帖子是200本音频
还有一个音乐宝盒帖子

作者: 我是花园 时间: 2012-3-31 06:49

原帖由 风中缘 于 2012-3-30 10:27 发表
绘本音频应该不少
见过一个帖子是200本音频
还有一个音乐宝盒帖子

那我要好好找找去了，谢谢你啦

作者: redapple0202 时间: 2012-3-31 15:00
为了防止老年痴呆，我也要和宝宝一起学英语了！

作者: lululah 时间: 2012-3-31 17:18

原帖由 我是花园 于 2012-3-29 11:31 发表

啥啥啥？我上下看了好几次，童童妈妈的上面就是我，你你你..不会说强妈就是我吧？？？？

天啊，如果你是说我的话，我可以告诉你啊，我英语最差了，我也只能读读分级读物了，因为有音频啊，绘本我基本现 ...

不是不是

只是借上帖的话开个玩笑啦，没想到引起了误会，抱歉抱歉。

作者: yankee318 时间: 2013-8-7 07:47
标题: 回复: 纽约时报的一篇关于孩子双语教育的文章，拿来分享
在小学毕业前掌握四门外语是可行的

作者: sandydad 时间: 2013-8-21 16:29
看了今年希望之星, 有个娃9岁能用4种语言和评委说话, 太棒了

作者: c_cucumber 时间: 2013-9-5 21:10
进来学习一下。谢谢小奶酪妈妈的分享。

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