BILINGUALISM: WHY CODE SWITCHING IS A PROBLEM OR AN ADVANTAGE?

First, the main idea of authors is showing us how bilingualism is used by children different from how adults do it, and what are the main aspects which are affected the most in their code-switching. How they mix grammatical morphemes with lexemes between 2 languages in all possible ways. Usually it could be thought that speaking to a child in two different languages can generates confusion or problems in his/her development of language and communicative patterns. Even, expert linguistics suggest to childrens parents not to speak more than one language in order to avoid future problems in communication but, what says theories about bilingualism up to 4 years old? Noam Chomskys theory states how bilingualism, especially in children, is directly related with a wider cognitive capacity because, according to Chomsky, the cognitive patterns are confronting many ways to say the same, in the one or the other language, or in both1. Furthermore the idea of children get confused with so many languages, could actually, confuse to monolingual people but not to the children themselves. I think bilingualism is a greater opportunity to develop as knowledge and performance skills, as personal growth through readings with access to more information in several known languages. Even if at the beginning of language learning, children are mixing morphemes, graphemes and lexemes in all possible combinations, it is an advantage to them because eventually they will find differences between a language and another one, in my opinion, because this is going to provide more knowledge about language respect to their first and second language acquisition process, which is taking place at the same time. In some specific cases it is observed how a child switches to English when he uses quotations, and throughout the rest of the story he reported it in Tok Pisin original language and in comparison with the Thea case, an English/Danish bilingual child who mix suffixes and prefixes from Danish to English and vice versa, we can find out how an important switching device is evolving related with age and proficiency level of languages, whereby we can conclude that children are able to learn an effective way of code-switching and thus their bilingualism is not going to turn into an alleged problem2. Besides everything has been mentioned, bilingualism could be used to respond to specific situations by means of Triggering, which is the way how a child get used to speak in the same language in known specific situations. This triggering is for me, an advantage, because a child is going to be able to address to peers using specific knowledge and making differentiation between codes used in house (mother and father), school (peers, teachers, books), and cultural relations with the environment where he/she lives. Bilingualism in children has to be managed very careful by parents and relatives in order to affect positively the final outcome of the child. It is known that learning or speaking a language is considerably affected by attitude towards the language and how this language is either accepted or not by peers, parents and relatives could change the perception of a child about either the affective benefits or the reprimand gestures and advices he receives. These things would move emotions inside the child whereby it would produce an encouragement or a discouragement attitude towards himself/herself about using one of his/her known languages. Finally, I think bilingual children up to 4 years old are in an advantaged position because they are growing up into a multi-cultural society, and the parents responsibility is bring them up for those new challenges. Moreover their bilingualism is going to provide them a huge knowledge and a lot of brain training. That is why the author consider that cognitive development is better in bilingual children especially when they acquired bilingualism up to 4 years old. According to CPH theory which states that first and second language acquisition is better and faster developed up to 12 years old children.3

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http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201305/noam-chomsky-bilingualism Language acquisition device, Chomsky (1967) 3 Lenneberg. (1967)