THE BILINGUALISM PLAN IN COLOMBIA

 BILINGUALISM

To be a bilingual person is to have the capacity and the ability to use of  a language, or differences in profiency between the two languages.

Let’s define bilingualism simply as the ability to express oneself with ease in two languages.

Bilinguals are not necessarily perfectly fluent in their languages; it is in fact quite common to have a dominant language.

BILINGUALISM IN COLOMBIA

Colombia is a multilingual and multicultural country. The government recognizes the coexistence of different native languages and Spanish in the same territory, as well as the importance of teaching a foreign language, especially English. Spanish is Colombia’s most widely spoken official language, which is present in all high schools´ levels and university curriculums.

Colombia National Ministry of education presented Colombia’s National Bilingualism Program 2004–2019 with the objective of implementing in public and private schools the incorporation of the English language. The idea of this project is to achieve the necessary competencies to perform the exams scheduled for the year 2025.

BILINGUAL AND BICULTURAL

People easily confuse the word bilingual and believe that when they call it bilingual the person can clearly master both languages, but the reality is not like that.  Therefore, a bilingual is someone capable of speaking two languages. However, if we look at the dictionary definition we will discover a subtle addition: Bilingual: fluent in two languages. Fluency is the key.

When we talk about bilingual people need to be taught based on five factors (text production, text comprehension and interpretation, literature, communication media, and other symbolic systems and ethics of communication but bilingual people don’t handle very well the second language. probably it could mange the 70% or 80% but not the 100%.

Bicultural is that which implies the coexistence or union of two cultures. The idea of culture, on the other hand, refers to all the knowledge, traditions and habits of a community, a historical period, etc.

A region is bicultural when there are two predominant cultures in its territory.

Canada is an example of a bicultural nation. In this North American country there are English-speaking areas whose roots are linked to England, and other French-speaking areas with customs that have their origins in France.

At this point it is important to differentiate between bicultural and bilingual. Bicultural, as we said, implies the presence of two cultures, while bilingual refers specifically to two languages. Generally, bicultural is also bilingual, although bilingual may not be bicultural.

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CONCLUSION

The incorporation of a second language in Colombia such as English has been a great advance for the Ministry of Education in incorporating the second language in both private and public schools and universities but to achieve the necessary skills for students to master the second language is very complex as it is necessary to incorporate school exchanges in other countries for students to experience and interact with other students, Unfortunately, those who can afford this luxury are the private schools, students have Spanish as their mother tongue and a pluralistic culture that handles different languages and different meanings that sometimes becomes complex to incorporate a language such as English where they are not used to hear.

Students know that learning English is a great opportunity to have greater opportunities to get a better job and have better economic benefits, they learn English as a second language to reach an achievement in an international company and in a world so globalized that you need to learn English to communicate with others. I think that the methodologies that are implemented in public schools need to change and bring a better teaching process by teachers and institutions for students to achieve their academic performance in learning a second language.

REFERENCES

Julio C. Alonso Cifuentes, Diana M. Díaz Mejía and Daniela Estrada Nates

Submitted: April 18th, 2017Reviewed: October 31st, 2017Published: December 20th, 2017

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.72114

Grosjean, F. (2013). Bilingualism: A short introduction. In Grosjean, F. & Li, P. (2013), pp. 5-25.