On the last Friday evening of February at the “Active Learning Center,” Dr. Cho Yong-beom, the head of Dutree Group, gave a special lecture on “Brilliant Children.” It’s time to explore in depth what challenges bilingual children can face learning, psychological, emotional and social, how to overcome, and what benefits they can have in the process of growing up.
Bilingual children are known to have the following advantages:
– Less prescriptive / more creative / more flexible and open to new ideas
– “Distributive thinking” in problem-solving – having the ability to find various, possible, and non-pessimistic solutions to a problem
– Two or more expressive(language) systems foster flexibility and creativity of thinking
– Looking at language as a single object (“meta-language recognition”), able to understand the arbitrary nature of words
– Have a rich sense of communication
– “Additional Antenna” – respond more sensitively to surroundings, pay more careful attention to conversations, and capture both verbal and non-verbal queues more delicately
What can be called bilingual does not depend on whether you can speak both languages perfectly, but on whether you can communicate with others in both languages in daily life. Thus, it is natural that bilingual abilities develop disproportionately according to the individual’s environment. A bilingual child can become either “Bilingual Additif” (when the child develops two languages equally and this experience of language development helps with subsequent cognitive development) or “Bilingual Sustractif” (when the child develops a second language at the expense of his or her native language).
It is often assumed that bilingual children are at a disadvantage, experiencing mental confusion when two languages are mixed up in their minds. However, according to academic research on brain observation, young children have overlapping regions of the brain that govern both languages, treating them as if they are a single language. All of our “Active Learning Center” clinicians use this academic and empirical knowledge to provide professional service to all of our children.
