How Is Multilingual Education Affecting Teen Literacy?

Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all Europeans claim to speak at least one language other than their mother tongue; but many read and write in one language. Always useful to traders, multilingualism is advantageous for people wanting to participate in globalization and cultural openness. Owing to the ease of access to information facilitated by the Internet, individuals' exposure to multiple languages is becoming increasingly possible. People who speak several languages are also called polyglots.Multilingual speakers have acquired and maintained at least one language during childhood, the so-called first language (L1). The first language (sometimes also referred to as the mother tongue) is usually acquired without formal education, by mechanisms about which scholars disagree. Children acquiring two languages natively from these early years are called simultaneous bilinguals. It is common for young simultaneous bilinguals to be more proficient in one language than the other.People who speak more than one language have been reported to be more adept at language learning compared to monolinguals.Multilingualism in computing can be considered part of a continuum between internationalization and localization. Due to the status of English in computing, software development nearly always uses it (but not in the case of non-English-based programming languages). Some commercial software is initially available in an English version, and multilingual versions, if any, may be produced as alternative options based on the English original.Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, morals, beliefs, and habits. Educational methods include teaching, training, storytelling, discussion and directed research. Education frequently takes place under the guidance of educators; however, learners can also educate themselves. Education can take place in formal or informal settings, and any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts may be considered educational. The methodology of teaching is called pedagogy. Formal education is commonly divided formally into stages such as preschool or kindergarten, primary school, secondary school and then college, university, or apprenticeship. In most regions, education is compulsory up to a certain age. There are movements for education reforms, such as for improving quality and efficiency of education towards relevance in students' lives and efficient problem solving in modern or future society at large, or for evidence-based education methodologies. A right to education has been recognized by some governments and the United Nations. Global initiatives aim at achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 4, which promotes quality education for all.Affect may refer to: Affect (education) Affect (linguistics), attitude or emotion that a speaker brings to an utterance Affect (philosophy) Affect (psychology), the experience of feeling or emotion Affect display, signs of emotion, such as facial expression, vocalization, and posture Affect theory Affective science, the scientific study of emotion Affective computing, an area of research in computer science aiming to understand the emotional state of users Reduced affect display, a.k.a. emotional blunting or affective flattening, a reduction in emotional reactivity Pseudobulbar affect, a.k.a. labile affect, the unstable display of emotion Affect (rhetoric), the responsive, emotional feeling that precedes cognition Affected accent; see Accent (sociolinguistics) Affect (company), a defunct Japanese video game developerLiteracy is popularly understood as an ability to read and write in at least one method of writing, an understanding reflected by mainstream dictionaries. In this view, illiteracy would be considered to be the inability to read and write.Some researchers suggest that the history of interest in the concept of “literacy” can be divided into two periods. Firstly is the period before 1950, when literacy was understood solely as alphabetical literacy (word and letter recognition). Secondly is the period after 1950, when literacy slowly began to be considered as a wider concept and process, i.e. functional literacy (Dijanošić, 2009).This widening of the traditional concept of literacy took place as consensus emerged among researchers in composition studies, education research, and anthropological linguistics that it makes little sense to speak of reading or writing outside of some specific context—a position James Paul Gee describes as "simply incoherent." For example, even extremely early stages of acquiring mastery over symbol-shapes take place in particular social contexts (even if that context is simply "school"), and after print acquisition, any instance of reading and writing will always be enacted for a particular purpose and occasion and with particular readers and writers in mind. Reading and writing, therefore, are never separable from social and cultural elements. A corollary point, made by David Barton and Rosalind (Roz) Ivanic, among others, is that the effects of literacy acquisition on cognition and social relations are not easily predictable, since, as Brian Street has argued, "the ways in which people address reading and writing are themselves rooted in conceptions of knowledge, identity, [and] being."