Alma Vögeli
(Swiss Foundation of Innovation, Albania)

 

 

Abstract: Bilingualism is an interesting issue in the light of the psychology studies. Bilingualism is an advantage when taught in childhood. Children tend to better and easily learn new languages in their first eight years of life. At the age of 3–6 years, one of the things that children find entertaining is to learn new things and this can happen without strain.

To explore the matter of bilingualism, this study will relies on the hypothesis below: “Bilingual children have more advantages than single language children”. For exploration of this hypothesis in the research will raise some research questions. The methodology that will be used to study is qualitative. Case studies with bilingual children and adults, interviews, observations and half structured questionnaires will serve as tools for data collection. To present a wider frame of bilingualism and its advantages on our global society this study will be consulted with various studies, articles, political documents, articles and reports within and outside Albania.

Multilingualism in Europe, whether into the society or education, it is becoming more and more a reality; one happens to find a language mixture into workplaces or school classes, consequently a mixture of cultures. If you want to teach two languages to our child, then our positioning is crucial. We should feel confident in that language yourself in the first place, whether you are a teacher, parent or a daycare educator. Only by doing this, the child can feel confident. It is not smart to just try and teach a language to a child. The language needs to be his/her world and life experience. Once the language is experienced by the child, only then the child really learned it.

This study will be a thorough search about bilingualism issues. Besides the quantitative data, this study will bring a unique approach and important quality data. Specific case studies of bilingual children and adults will bring important data for the advantages of bilingualism when taught in childhood. It should be emphasized that this study cannot generalized in terms of the topics but will bring data which are scarce in Albania. Bilingualism is a new field of view under the point of view of psychology for Albania and recommended that after this study to continue other studies foe bilingualism, for this for personal and in the same time as global wealth.

 

 

Key words: bilingualism, language, child, childhood, parent, teacher