Advantage and Disadvantage of Multi-lingual

I recently this article “No advantage to being multi-lingual, Australian study finds” on SMH. This is another interesting one, as Australia and particular Sydney is traditionally immigrant country, just matter of when. There is also a very diverse origin of where the migrants came from. This makes sporting match fun as there is always supporters for whoever is playing and multi-lingual matter of fact for many children.

So this topic is certainly of much interest to many, the basic finding in the article is that being multi-lingual offers no advantage and disadvantage academically. This I agree with myself, provide the person in question is proficient in English, it is certainly case for all my friends. This in my experience generally holds true for kids who come before high school, for the older kids they tend to suffer a little with the humanitarian subjects which is not surprising.

Whilst being multi-lingual offers no advantage academically, it certainly offers a lot of advantages later on in your life. A couple of my friends secured excellent jobs with promising career due to their multi-lingual skills, these are positions they would have never secured without the proficiency in other languages.

For many children of immigrants in Australia, speaking the same language as their parents offers the closeness in relationship sometimes very difficult to achieve otherwise. I also had friends that never mastered the mother tongue that their parents spoke and because the limited English skill the parents command, the home conversation often limited to what I call “kitchen talk”. This is limited to day to day thing, like what you done today, what we having for dinner etc. However discussion of news topic, deeper discussions etc are all next to impossible.

《Advantage and Disadvantage of Multi-lingual》有2个想法

  1. I consider studies like that a total waste of time and resources. Is the “so what?” that is the far more important question and it doesn’t take a full scale study to unpick that.

    1. It is true that many studies tend to manipulate and interpret the data to fit the intended result. However often there are gems of information to be picked from these regardless how useless they may look sometimes.

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