Full Description
As bilingual individuals enter the educational system and the clinical landscape, they struggle with intricate, often painful questions of identity, culture, and assimilation. Professionals working with these individuals need to complement their knowledge of specific cultural issues with the psychological processes that all bilingual speakers share. The Bilingual Mind: Thinking, Feeling, and Speaking in Two Languages fills a critical gap in the cross-cultural literature by illuminating the bilingual experience in both its social and clinical contexts.
Rafael Javier makes a convincing, empirically founded case for what he terms the bilingual mind, with its own particular approach to cognition, memory, and emotional and social development. From this framework, he proceeds to salient but seldom examined questions such as: What are the effects of bilingualism on cognitive development? Is some degree of language shifting always present in bilingual thinking? Do interpreters improve or compromise communication? What assessment instruments are best suited to bilingual individuals? What are the key issues in providing appropriate treatment interventions to bilingual patients? How can professionals be better trained to work with this population?
Given the prevalence of -- and controversies surrounding-- bilingualism today, the author intends his text to benefit a wide range of therapists, education professionals, and scholars. The Bilingual Mind will prove as valuable to the frontline clinician and the evaluator as to the linguistic student and the policymaker designing the future of bilingual services.
Contents
I. Bilingualism and Social Context. Linguistic communities. Fear of bilingualism? Traditional solution to the bilingual problem. Current state of affairs and the bilingual phenomenon.- II. Is There A Bilingual Mind? The bilingual process in context of the cognitive development. Evidence of the bilingual mind?.- III. Bilingual Linguistic Organization. The Coordinate-Compound Linguistic Organization Controversy. Compound linguistic system. Coordinate linguistic system. The Language Independence Phenomenon. Psychological/psychoanalytic observation. Psycholinguistic studies. Neurological evidence.- IV. Language Switching As A Communication. Factors Affecting Switching. Structural linguistic factors. Extra-linguistic and affective factors.- Role of stress in code-switching.- V. Bilingual Memory And Language of Affect. Bilingual memory models. Bilingual memory for meaningful information.- VI. Communication Through Interpreters. Communication process. Components of communication. Interpretation process. Challenges to accurate interpretation. Methods of interpretation. Common errors: Omission, Addition, Condensation, Substitution, Role exchange.- VII. Issues In Assessing The Bilingual Individual. Personal motivation/specific needs of the referring person. Linguistic challenges in the assessment process. Validity of the assessment instruments. Factors to be considered in assessing a bilingual individual. Selection of basic assessment instruments.- VIII. Treatment of the Bilingual Individual. Memory organization in bilingual patients. Nature of memory inaccessibility in a bilingual context. Technical consideration. Conclusion.- X. Future of Bilingualism: What Should Be Our Response? Traditional response. There is no easy solution to the bilingual dilemma. There are signs of hope.Only a flexible model makes sense.- General Recommendations.
