Bilingual or multilingual children have to change languages frequently. They should change their language style in different scenes through constant observation and thinking, just like they need to look around when driving. This way of constantly changing roles will make children pay more attention to observing the surrounding environment, and they can also grasp the social and emotional context more quickly.
Bilingual children have shown a strong ability to accept other people's views and express them with others since childhood.
Researchers in Montreal, Canada, found that bilingual children can get along better with others and resist common social preferences among children.
A recent study by the National University of Singapore shows that bilingual children show less racial prejudice than monolingual children. Therefore, bilingual education opens children's social world and develops their early potential of establishing social relations.
Strong cognitive ability
Learning to be bilingual or multilingual will exercise children's thinking and continuously enhance their cognitive ability.
Some researchers have found that bilinguals are better at solving intellectual problems than monolinguals. They once asked bilingual children and monolingual children to put blue circles in blue square boxes and red squares in red round boxes. Everyone did a good job in this task.
However, when they ask children to classify according to shape rather than color, bilingual children are obviously much faster than monolingual children.
Research shows that children who learn two languages from an early age will show higher IQ. First of all, the two language systems are more conducive to the formation of children's concepts of things. Secondly, because bilingual children need to switch between two languages at any time according to different contexts to find the best expression, this process is conducive to improving the flexibility of the brain and the development of abstract thinking.
Greater concentration and creativity
Bilingual ability has improved several important psychological functions. For example, research shows that the experience of learning bilingualism helps us to understand information quickly.
Bilingual children can show greater concentration when they are asked to concentrate on one thing and ignore distracting information. Bilingual children can also do this more effectively when they are asked to turn their attention elsewhere.
Attention concentration and distraction are the key abilities in the intellectual system, which help us to learn and process information quickly and play a good role in schools and other environments.
In addition, bilingual children show stronger psychological resilience. For example, they have advantages in adapting to new rules and new situations. Greater psychological flexibility can also make bilingual children more creative. In other words, bilingual teaching can cultivate children's "intellectual innovation".
In other words, bilingual children can see the same situation from many angles. This divergent thinking ability helps bilingual children solve complex problems. Similarly, when asked to solve problems they have never encountered before, bilingual children perform better than monolingual children in finding new solutions.
Researchers have proved that these characteristics have great advantages in solving academic problems, including building mathematical ability.