Bilingualism
Located in the South of France, l'Ecole Agile is a bilingual French/English school. The advantages of speaking several languages are so numerous that we feel it important to provide a bilingual environment to all our members. Here are The Benefits of Being Bilingual: The Agile List.
The knowledge of several languages opens up many doors, both physical and virtual. Languages facilitate personal growth, academic achievement and professional success.
Contents
1. A Bilingual Environment
2. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
3. The Benefits of Being Bilingual: The Agile List
4. Languages Used on the Internet
Vocabulary List
Bilingual: Speaking two languages fluently.
Bilingualism: Fluency in or use of two languages.
Monolingual: (of a person or society) speaking only one language. bilingual, trinlingual, plurilingual, multilingual.
Multilingual: In or using several languages.
Plurilingual: Relating to, involving, or fluent in a number of languages; multilingual.
Polyglot: 1. Knowing or using several languages. 1.1 (of a book) having the text translated into several languages.
(Source: http://www.larousse.fr)
One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way. – Frank Smith
A Bilingual Environment
Recent studies have shown that we learn more if we are fully engaged. Thus, at l'Ecole Agile members learn languages naturally through fun and games. Their job is to play and through play they learn and discover the world that surrounds them.
Playing in a foreign language enables one to :
- develop simultaneous abilities: cognitive, motricity, social and linguistic;
- focus on pleasure and not on the finer grammatical structure of a language.
Within the needs of a project, a member can choose to learn a language from a grammatical point of view - we will of course facilitate his learning.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
The bilingual brain and neuroscience :
Learning a language involves two specific brain areas in our brain: Wernicke's area, which allows us to understand languages, and Broca's area, which allows us to express ourselves orally. Juggling two languages gives bilinguals better control over the brain's executive functions.
In other words, learning several languages Strengthens visual-spatial and verbal memory.Thus, the bilingual processes each piece of information more quickly and overcomes unexpected situations more easily. The bilingual brain functions more efficiently and stimulates concentration, curiosity, listening and thinking (study conducted in 2015 by researchers at Georgetown University).
Using medical imaging, researchers have found that the volume of grey matter in the prefrontal cortex of a bilingual brain is greater than in a monolingual brain. This is scientific proof that bilinguals have higher than average executive functions.
The Benefits of Being Bilingual: The Agile List
What language does the Internet speak?
English is considered a common denominator in the world of business and the internet. English is the first language of the global web with more than half of the content (52.3%) written in English (Statista, 2017).
Followed by Chinese, Spanish and Russian, where Chinese has the particularity of having many more Internet users speaking this language than content created (the same is true for Spanish).
French is the sixth language on the Internet with 4% of content created, but only 2.8% of Internet users are French-speaking.
English and French in the World
| English | French | |
| 3rd most spoken language in the world 375 million speakers 1st language learned as a foreign language 1st business language in the world 1st language of the Internet Spoken in nearly 63 states | 6th most spoken language in the world 274 million speakers 2nd language learned as a foreign language 3rd largest business language in the world 6th language of the Internet Spoken in nearly 29 states |
