Hablamos muchos idiomas juntos

It’s practically common knowledge that children benefit from early foreign language exposure

At Mighty Minds Little Hands International Preschool, your children will get the benefits of Spanish and French language parallel immersion from qualified professionals. Scientific research has identified a multitude of benefits, some of them include—

  • Boost Brain Power. Early exposure to more than one language stimulates the neurons in the developing brain. It literally expands your child’s learning capacity and cognitive ability.

  • Take Advantage of the Window of Opportunity. Until about the age 12, kids can soak up languages naturally. Scientific research now shows that 1-12 year olds can learn a second or even third language much more easily than will ever be possible later in life.

  • Achieve Excellent Reading Skills. Children learning a foreign language are able to recognize symbolic relationships between letters/characters and sounds-skills which help make excellent readers.

  • Increase I.Q. and SAT scores. Studies show that language learning leads to higher I.Q. and higher scores on every section of the SAT.

  • A Native Accent is Still Easy. We at Mighty Minds, Little Hands use authentic, native speakers so your child will pick up native speech patterns. Rolling the “r” in Spanish is second nature to them.

  • Become a Citizen of the World. Business, science and the arts are all global. Imagine your child’s tomorrow. Speaking only English is NO longer enough

The truth is that bilingual children have active and flexible brains. They have enhanced levels of metalinguistic awareness (knowledge of how language works), proven to be essential to learning how to read. In addition, bilingual people have an easier time in understanding math concepts and solving word problems. They develop strong thinking skills, and tend to be better at focusing, remembering, and making decisions. Below is more specific information from a 2015 study published in the academic journal Child Development Perspectives.


 
 
To their surprise, bilingual children outperformed their monolingual peers on essentially all of the tests, including nonverbal intelligence.

Up until the 1950s, there was a popular belief that exposing children to more than one language was a potentially dangerous experience. The expectation was that children would display signs of mental confusion. This view was eventually challenged by a study by Peal and Lambert in which monolingual French and bilingual French-English children completed a battery of tests.

The researchers predicted that monolingual and bilingual children would be equivalent on measures of nonverbal intelligence but that bilinguals would obtain lower scores on verbal measures. To their surprise, bilingual children outperformed their monolingual peers on essentially all of the tests, including nonverbal intelligence.

In contrast to the earlier descriptions, therefore, Peal and Lambert argued that bilingual children showed enhanced “mental flexibility”, perhaps as a consequence of having to switch between languages. Thus was born the idea of a “bilingual advantage,” and an active area of research investigating its qualitative nature, its limiting boundaries, and its possible causes soon followed.

Their brains are very active and flexible. They develop strong thinking skills, and tend to be better at focusing, remembering and making decisions.

A large body of research has now documented benefits of bilingualism for children’s cognitive development, and there is substantial evidence that the language environment that children experience influences the quality of the cognitive systems they develop, so it should not be surprising that bilingualism is an important factor in developmental outcomes. Now there is a significant body of research examining the effect of bilingualism on cognition, and most of the tasks in which bilingual advantages are found are considered to be indicators of executive function. The executive functions are a set of processes that all have to do with managing oneself and one's resources in order to achieve a goal. It is an umbrella term for the neurologically-based skills involving mental control and self-regulation.Individuals who are bilingual switch between two different language systems.

You can read more about Executive Functioning here→

You can review the entire abstract here→