Being Bilingual Essay

Many of you reading this already are on to the fact that being bilingual is no longer an option, it is a necessity. As a mom of three children, all of whom are bilingual to varying degrees, and as an educator of thousands of young children over the past twenty years, I have watched first hand the growing demand from our society to prepare our young children for a global economy.

No longer is it enough to give them a few colors and shapes in preschool, hope that their elementary school might incorporate a few days of the week spoken in two languages here or months there, and then trust that, come middle school, they will eagerly and easily catch on to second language learning.

We know that is not how it works. We have all witnessed the lack

Never once did I hesitate to make more cassette tapes for my first grade students way back in the day of no CDs just because I was not a native Latina. In fact, the parents of my students thanked me profusely for bringing a new language to their children. A language that was so dominant around them in their daily lives and would allow these children to travel successfully through a very global economy.

I will tell you that now, as I deal more and more with the toddler and preschool age children, I realize even more language learning seems to take place during those very formative years. It is the kind of learning where you feel like you can literally see the new words from the new language going into the ears of the young child and being soaked up like a big sponge soaks up water!

Little children between the ages of one and five learn with such reckless abandon. They have no inhibitions placed on them from society at this point so they feel free to learn and express what they learn at any and all times. Those of us who have had or still have toddlers and preschoolers in our lives know just what I am talking about! Ask them to tell you what they learned, and you might as well pull up a big easy chair. Ask a ten year old or even more so a sixteen year old what they learned in school and silence ensues! It is like asking your old calico cat to come when she is