>>I would like to see any statistics tending to prove that pupils learning
>>more languages have worse results in maths or science than the unilingual
>>ones (let's say a comparison between HK pupils and the US ones ;-)).
>
>There won't be. All evidence (and there's lots of it here in Ireland where
>we have English-medium and Irish-medium schools) shows that, in general,
>children who are bilingual do BETTER in school than monolingual children.
I grew up in Slovakia. By default every Slovak child grew up with two
languages: Slovak and Czech. In fact, so much so, we did not even think of
Czech as a foreign language.
Additionally, many children in my home city of Bratislava grew up learning
Hungarian and German as well. We had to study Russian starting in the third
grade. I studied German since the second grade (I did not study Hungarian,
though, as I said, many others did).
I did very well at school, as did many of my classmates. I was also an avid
reader as a child (still am, for that matter) and was able to learn many
things on my own. I really fail to see how learning more can make you a
poorer student.
It just comes with the territory, so to speak. And with the attitude: A
Slovak proverb says: "As many languages you know, that many times you are a
human being."
In my personal experience, learning languages from early childhood was an
advantage, not a disadvantage. At the age of 29, I left Slovakia, spent 6
months in Austria. In that time, I took two months of intensive Italian (a
language I did not study before), then moved to Rome, enrolled to Gregorian
University, and was ready to study with no difficulties.
Cheers,
Adam
===> Whiz Kid Technomagic <===
http://www.whizkidtech.net/
The resource center for webmasters and web users
Winner of the Starting Point Hot Site award
Winner of the Lighthouse Award
Home of the Web Magic Award
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:17 EDT