Course Description:This course will first explore the nature of bilingualism, focusing on its neurolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and linguistic aspects. Students will examine the most important concepts and research questions in these areas. In addition, the class will focus on bilingualism in the United States and the Spanish-speaking world, including the examination of bilingual education programs (e.g., immersion programs) and important political matters connected to them.
Course Narrative: Throughout this semester we spent our time reading texts that explained different aspects in regards to bilingualism. We focus on discussing how bilingualism works within the brain and also what part of the brain controls the language aspects of a person, also known as neurolinguistic. Class discussions revolve around the assigned texts which helped us understand certain topics better since some topics such as linguistic rules are a but confusing. It was amazing to learn how psycholinguistic is in charge of investigating the process of the human language acquisition of a language in children and adults. This course fulfills the MLO 2 Linguistics, considering that by exploring bilingualism, we focus on the linguistics aspects and how a brain of a bilingual person works compared to the brain of a monolingual person. Something that really struck me the most was to learn how even when we are still in our mother's womb, we are able to listen to the language our mom speaks and once we are born we are able to recognize the language we listened while we developed in our mother's womb. Overall, this course was filled with valuable information on the different aspects of bilingualism and now I'm aware of the benefits of being bilingual and how my brain works as transition from Spanish to English and vice versa.